The House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende, is one of the great works in the magical realism movement prominent in post-colonial literature, especially that of Latin America. While it lacks the broad scope and dreamlike qualities of the genre’s paragon, One Hundred Years of Solitude, it is still an epic combining romance, the rise and fall of a great family, and the turbulent political history of the never-named country of Chile. (The book also appears in the “second 100” list of honorable mentions in the Novel 100.)

The central thread in the story is the Trueba family, introduced after what amounts to a lengthy prologue on the daughter of a prominent local family who is betrothed to Esteban Trueba. When that girl, the beautiful Rosa, dies suddenly, Trueba heads to his family’s property in a remote section of the country and builds a modern-day plantation, sublimating his grief into work. He returns to marry Rosa’s younger sister, the clairvoyant Clara (Spanish for “clear”), and the two enter a long and ultimately stormy marriage, begetting three children and one grandchild who will become central in the book’s rapid-fire conclusion during the overthrow of the democratically elected government of The Candidate. (Never named, the Candidate is obviously Salvador Allende, the author’s uncle, who was overthrown and assassinated in a US-backed coup in 1973 that installed the brutal dictator Augustus Pinochet into office and plunged Chile into over a decade of political and economic misery.)

The emphasis of the story is fluid, with early emphasis on the passionate yet dispassionate love affair between Esteban, who on some level still yearns for his deceased lover, and Clara, whose connection to the spirit world puts her beyond Esteban’s emotional reach:

He wanted far more than her body; he wanted control over that undefined and luminous material that lay within her and escaped him evening those moments when she appeared to be dying of pleasure.

Esteban is, despite humble origins, a reactionary, an ardent defender of The Way Things Are and The Way We’ve Always Done It, putting him in conflict with his wife, his daughter and her revolutionary lover, and eventually his granddaughter and her own forbidden paramour. The father’s sins are ultimately visited on his progeny, especially granddaughter Alba, who ends up a political prisoner of the Pinochet regime.

Allende mixes narratives, with most of the novel told by an omniscient narrator with a wry outlook and hints of sarcasm, broken up by occasional soliloquies from Esteban Trueba, speaking in his last years as he looks back over his life and those of his family members. Trueba’s sections drag relative to the remainder of the book because we know that his perspective is tainted by his political leanings and complicity in much of the violence that peppers the book. The third-person narration also has a near-monopoly on the book’s subtle humor, which never dominates the text but slips seamlessly into the narrative, such as the description of one of Esteban’s sons, returned from a spiritual journey in India:

… his skin clinging to his bones, and that lost gaze so often observed in those who eat only vegetables.

Or, in my favorite line from the book, in the discussion of how most families have one member who’s certifiable, while the Truebas appear to have avoided that affliction:

No. Here the madness was divided up equally, and there was nothing left over for us to have our own lunatic.

Allende clearly favors the progress of modernity over the rigid hierarchy of the old economic system and the autocratic system used to prop it up, but there’s a recurring note of wistful nostalgia for the culture of the earlier years. The book’s spiritual underpinnings, ranging from Clara’s communications with the spirits living in their urban mansion to her ability to play Chopin on a piano that’s several feet away to the simple naturalism of the peasants on their rural estate, are all presented favorably, even admiringly, and are set off from the obstinate conservatism of Trueba and the old guard.

The novel undergoes one abrupt change after Clara dies and the coup to overthrow the Candidate begins, turning from an epic romance/family saga into a political or psychological thriller. Allende takes us into the political prison with Alba while we also see the frantic efforts of her aged grandfather, now politically impotent after years of playing a critical role in the government, to free her. How he ultimately does so is one of the most charming, emotional, and wryly funny passages in the book.

Next up: Having finished book eleven of A Dance to the Music of Time while I procrastinated on this writeup, I’ve just started Halldór Laxness’ Independent People. Laxness was an Icelandic novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955, but 120 pages in, I’m not impressed.