The House of the Spirits fills another hole in my A Century of Books project, and although I believe I’ve read at least one book by Allende, it isn’t this one.
For a long time, you don’t have any sense of when this novel is set. Even when it mentions a big war in Europe, you’re not quite sure if it’s World War I or II. (It’s I.) It took a lot of attention to establish a time setting for this expansive, wandering account that, although generally written in chronological order, sometimes skips forward and sometimes backward. I finally figured out that the novel takes place from shortly before World War I until 1973.
Although the novel contains some information about previous generations, it concentrates mostly on Clara, her children, and her granddaughter Alba. It is narrated mostly by Clara and Alba, with short passages by Esteban Trueba, Clara’s husband.
Clara lives in the house of the spirits, where she can see and hear the wandering spirits and is herself clairvoyant. When Clara is still quite young, Esteban Trueba falls in love with her older, green-haired sister Rosa, and they become engaged. But Rose dies, and Trueba goes off to reclaim the family estate, ruined by his father. There, if he wasn’t one already, he becomes a brutal man with an uncontrollable temper.
Clara grows up in her eccentric family performing experiments in the supernatural with her mother and some of her friends. When Trueba returns years later, having accomplished his goal of making his estate the most prosperous in the area, he asks if the family has any more marriageable daughters. There is Clara.
The novel follows the couple’s story and that of its descendants, their eccentricities and fates, in a wandering way. It ends shortly after Chile’s brutal military coup in 1973.
This is an eccentric, enthralling novel. Although I am not usually a fan of magical realism, in this novel it seemed almost organic. I think once you start it, you just can’t help being pulled along.
What? Me Read? 