The House of the Spirits

Though not as circular as One Hundred Years of Solitude, The House of the Spirits does begin and end with almost the exact same sentence. It does however, reflect the cycle of social lives and how they repeat and occasionally change from generation to generation. Furthermore, I’ll repeat what I said about Marquez’s epic and apply it here: The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende is not for the faint of heart, nor the short on imagination.

Published in 1982, it is a fairy’s tale of love, ambition, the mysticism of humanity, and the course of history in one Latin American country told from the perspective of someone who truly lived it. Allende is a master when it comes to creating magical realism that stays true to itself: what she writes is both magical and real. In The House of the Spirits she has delivered us a tale of the fictional Trueba and del Valle families and allowed us to share in their lives as they live them alongside the political clashes that marred South America’s history in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, the divisive gulf that (still) exists between the indigenous and the criollos there, and the very real Poet and the Candidate/President.

In short, to understand social justice, liberation theology, or South America, one must have read this book. The clash that marks the beginning of the end of this text really happened, on September 11^th, 1973; a different kind of terrifying 9/11. The torture, the horror, the human rights violations are all true. A good follow-up to The House of the Spirits would be Allende’s Of Love and Shadows followed by My Invented Country.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I adore Allende’s books. I chose this book in April for our club to read because I want other people to read her and love her too. And if they don’t I can’t say I didn’t try. She opens up a world of literary possibility that is a bit more accessible than Marquez while giving the reader a glimpse of a culture, history, and people that we know so very little about in the United States, despite our government’s involvement there, despite our dependence on oil from there, despite our proximity, and despite our common history of invasion and colonization.

Of Love and Shadows

Of Love and Shadows written by the brilliant modern-day Scheherazade that is Isabel Allende (ah-YEN-day) was not as wonderful as I wanted it to be, but it turned out to be just as spellbinding as I would expect of her. Let me begin...

I was told by an history professor who I admired that his favorite author was Allende. This alone made her writings seem intimidating, but I feared not and read The House of the Spirits, Eva Luna, and The Stories of Eva Luna; three of the most brilliantly written books I have ever had the pleasure of reading. They are magical and desperate and violent and erotic. She continues Latin America's tradition of magical realism and wields her pen with precision, turning out stories that are absolutely fantastic, dreamlike, and very real. It isn't enough to say Allende is my favorite author, I adore her books; she dashes any goals of authorship I may have because I simply am not good enough. Of Love and Shadows wasn't what I expected because in it Allende cast off the gauzy shroud of magical realism in favor of a brutal and honest look at human suffering. I was looking for an adventurous fairy tale and got a heavy dose of why living in the United States with the Bill of Rights is such a treasure.

That having been said, Of Love and Shadows is one of Allende's shorter novels, relating a story of desperate love and a psyche awakened to the horrors of living under a military dictatorship in Latin America (read: Chile in the 1970s following the coup that ousted Allende's uncle, socialist president Salvador Allende). Irene Beltrán is the protagonist and Francisco Leal is there too. He's lovely. He rides a motorcycle and has long hair and is called Francisco. Mmmm...

Sorry. So there is a mine and there are corpses and lovemaking and desaparecidos. Allende manages to pull the reader into a story of covert grave digging, people being "disappeared," and the families they leave behind, all in a way that makes it believable. This is an important element because while the story in the book may not be fact, it nonetheless happened to thousands of people, and thousands of families, and continues to happen all over the world, today, right now, as you're reading this. This is the kind of thing we never studied in high school in the US because there wasn't enough time, or it didn't relate to the US, or we all partook in an outrageously racist history curriculum, or because the CIA doesn't want us to know (you decide, get back to me). I am thankful to a Spanish teacher in high school who wove language, culture, and history together in a way that gave me an understanding of the world as a global place and kept me from feeling academically confined (te agradezco Sra. Laporta).

If you are looking to get to know Allende and her books, don't start with this one, but do get around to reading it. Then learn more about Oscar Romero, Charles Harmon, the CIA, and Latin America in the 1970s and 80s. It will fill in some gaps and teach you another meaning of the word freedom.