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Allende's first and best work of art. The story of three generations of Trueba women that tells the history of a nation.
During the first 10 pages I was thinking to myself that there is way too much similarity on so many levels to One Hundred Years of Solitude, but why not, since it's the bible of Latin American magical realism?
In addition to Clara, the second Del Valle daughter who forsaw the future, communicated with spirits, and moved objects without touching them, and Blanca, her daughter who was castaway because of her forbidden love story with a communist peasant, and Alba, Blanca's daughter who had the green hair of her great aunt Rosa, the story of the book also revolves around Senator Esteban Trueba, the hardline right-wing, anti-communist, angry yet heartbroken oligarch; the Latin Patriarch of the Trueba family, and the man who built the big house on the corner. Allende almost seems rather sympathetic to the man who supressed his workers, raped all the peasant girls he could get his hands on, denied his illigitimate children, knocked the teeth out of his wife's mouth, beat his daughter and alienated her, almost killing her lover and forcing her to marry a French count with strange sexual fetishes, and contibuted greatly to the fall of a democratic government. What's the reason for this sympathetic attitude? maybe because it's Isabelle's own grandfather? Probably.
What I loved most about The House of the Spirits is that it bore witness to the most important part of Chilean history: the Pinochet era. The narration of events that lead to the rising popularity of leftist parties that lead to the election of "the President" who is Salvador Allende- related to the author- the role the oligarchy played in giving the military a new-found power which resulted in the assasination of Allende, the fall of democracy in a country that was unfamiliar to coups and non-democratic processes, and the instillation of a tyrannical right-wing dictatorship that killed off its political enemies, tortured political prisoners, assasinated whoever was suspect of Marxism, and ruined the history of a nation, headed by Pinochet.
The best way to follow this book is by reading her memoires: My Invented Country, and getting a Pablo Neruda - referred to as The Poet in the book- poetry collection.
During the first 10 pages I was thinking to myself that there is way too much similarity on so many levels to One Hundred Years of Solitude, but why not, since it's the bible of Latin American magical realism?
In addition to Clara, the second Del Valle daughter who forsaw the future, communicated with spirits, and moved objects without touching them, and Blanca, her daughter who was castaway because of her forbidden love story with a communist peasant, and Alba, Blanca's daughter who had the green hair of her great aunt Rosa, the story of the book also revolves around Senator Esteban Trueba, the hardline right-wing, anti-communist, angry yet heartbroken oligarch; the Latin Patriarch of the Trueba family, and the man who built the big house on the corner. Allende almost seems rather sympathetic to the man who supressed his workers, raped all the peasant girls he could get his hands on, denied his illigitimate children, knocked the teeth out of his wife's mouth, beat his daughter and alienated her, almost killing her lover and forcing her to marry a French count with strange sexual fetishes, and contibuted greatly to the fall of a democratic government. What's the reason for this sympathetic attitude? maybe because it's Isabelle's own grandfather? Probably.
What I loved most about The House of the Spirits is that it bore witness to the most important part of Chilean history: the Pinochet era. The narration of events that lead to the rising popularity of leftist parties that lead to the election of "the President" who is Salvador Allende- related to the author- the role the oligarchy played in giving the military a new-found power which resulted in the assasination of Allende, the fall of democracy in a country that was unfamiliar to coups and non-democratic processes, and the instillation of a tyrannical right-wing dictatorship that killed off its political enemies, tortured political prisoners, assasinated whoever was suspect of Marxism, and ruined the history of a nation, headed by Pinochet.
The best way to follow this book is by reading her memoires: My Invented Country, and getting a Pablo Neruda - referred to as The Poet in the book- poetry collection.
