la casa de los espíritus by isabel allende

These two are completely different from each other: Esteban is nearly twenty years older than Clara, and his abrasive and overly-ambitious personality is set against the meek and spiritual nature of his wife.

The core of the novel lies in the couple formed by Esteban Trueba and Clara del Valle, who live in Chile in the beginning of the twentieth century. Thus, three generations of the Trueba clan are depicted in this story, comprising remarkable characters and memorable overturns. In the same way as many novels of the magic realism trend, “La Casa de Los Espiritus” is a chronicle of a family saga. Whilst it may be true that such a genre is employed by Isabel Allende, it doesn’t solely justify the success and impact it has had throughout the world, which even led to its adaptation to film, starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. It would be an outright understatement to label this book as an emulation of Gabriel García Márquez’s magic realism style.

Moreover, it bares the connotation of an autobiography, not only due to its original script, but also because its plot is in many ways intertwined with the story and political significance of her family, personified in the character of the President, that subtly refers to her second-degree cousin, Salvador Allende. As a matter of fact, this book derived from a letter she had been writing for her grandfather, while she was exiled in Venezuela, and therefore gives the impression of being an unplanned endeavor. It occurred to me that her career as a journalist had done little to aware people of her potential as a novelist, and that she came to the Latin-American literary panorama as a sort of late bloomer. Hence, here is my personal account of the book that is deemed the pinnacle of her literary career.Īt the time of its publishing, in 1982, Isabel Allende was entering her forties, a fact that startled me at first. In my last publishing, I wrote about the life and work of Chilean-American author Isabel Allende ( ), and by the end of it I mentioned that the subject of my next review would be “La Casa de Los Espiritus” (The House of Spirits), her very first novel. “Escribo, ella escribió, que la memoria es frágil y el transcurso de una vida es muy breve y sucede todo tan deprisa, que no alcanzamos a ver la relación entre los acontecimientos, no podemos medir la consecuencia de los actos, creemos en la ficción del tiempo, en el presente, el pasado y el futuro, pero puede ser también que todo ocurre simultáneamente (…)” ( I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events, we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously (…))

La casa de los espíritus by isabel allende