There is so much that Isabel Allende weaves into her writing, it is simply astounding. There is so much history, allegory, and personal stakes woven into the story of one family that it is almost impossible to know where to start. How have I not read this before? Why the holy fucking hell did I have to read Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis when this existed in the world. I COULD HAVE DEMONSTRATED THE STUDY OF LITERARY WORKS IN CONTEXT THROUGH THE STUDY OF WORKS IN TRANSLATION SO MUCH BETTER WITH THIS THAN THAT TRIPE. I feel like my International Baccalaureate teachers went with Kiss of the Spiderwoman because it was short and needed something translated from another language. C’MON THIS WORK IS ALL ABOUT CULTURAL ASSUMPTIONS, YOU DAMN IB TEACHERS OF MINE.
Ok, I promise to calm down and write a coherent review. I hate Kafka a lot, guys. And I loved this.
From Goodreads, here’s the synopsis:
Isabel Allende weaves a luminous tapestry of three generations of the Trueba family, revealing both triumphs and tragedies. Here is patriarch Esteban, whose wild desires and political machinations are tempered only by his love for his ethereal wife, Clara, a woman touched by an otherworldly hand. Their daughter, Blanca, whose forbidden love for a man Esteban has deemed unworthy infuriates her father, yet will produce his greatest joy: his granddaughter Alba, a beautiful, ambitious girl who will lead the family and their country into a revolutionary future. The House of the Spirits is an enthralling saga that spans decades and lives, twining the personal and the political into an epic novel of love, magic, and fate.
I took a long time to read this book not because it bored me, but because each paragraph, each page, and each chapter need time to be digested and understood. This wasn’t a novel that I could power through, or skim, or even wanted to. This is a book that needed and deserved to be savored. Tracing nearly a hundred years of the life of a family, Allende unpacks the various forces that cause the sweeping and epic changes of a country, and the sorrows and triumphs of a family.
A lot is written about the magical realism aspects of Allende’s writing here. The book’s characters literally see ghosts and interact with the spirit world. But… it’s just another aspect of the book, the same as not referring to internationally recognizable persons by names and instead using titles. It’s all in the world that Allende is building, and feels as normal as anything else, in the best possible way. It’s not played for cheap thrills, it’s all just part and parcel of how these characters interact with their world, which is also our world.
I am so glad that the Read Harder Challenge this year included a task that fit this one, which pulled it up my to read list and onto this year’s plate.
OMG YOU WERE IN IB!!!!! SO WAS I!!!! HOW DID I NOT KNOW THIS!!!!
(My teacher did pick this book for us to read, but I was young and stupid and did not appreciate it at the time. I really need to re-read it.)
It is true, I also survived IB. The literary criticism lingers, and whenever I write a review that I don’t feel is detailed enough I can practically see the red pen on the screen (looking at you, Children of God review).
Honestly, they picked some great things for us but they were tweaking the curriculum. We didn’t read the same things as the year ahead of us or the year behind us.
Yeah, I definitely did not read the standard high school English canon. We read this and Invisible Man and One Hundred Years of Solitude and Snow Country and some Faulkner . . . most of the “classics” I didn’t read until college, or even grad school.
Heh, “survived.” Ain’t that the truth.
Oh yeah, lots of friends say “didn’t you read _____ in high school?” and the answer is invariably no. I read three Shakespeare’s a year, Ibsen’s The Doll House, freakin’ Kafka, Beloved, Turn of the Screw, The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men, Handmaids Tale, All Quiet on the Western Front… but there was also all the Austen, so I can’t complain too much. :)
As I told you when we met in NY, I LOVE this book so much. I used to re-read it once every few years, but parts of it are also so painful to me, that now that I am older and more emotional (and there are so many other shiny books out there distracting me), I don’t read it as often. It’s the book that truly started my great love for Allende’s writing, though, and despite her long career, I still think it’s one of her best.
I’m excited that I still have so many more of hers to dig into. I also enjoyed how emphatic Mark was in his appreciation of Allende :)