The house of the spirits

Allende's first novel is the one that put her on the literary map, a semi-autobiographical tale of a Chilean family in turbulent historical times, written in a dreamy, fanicful style known as “magical realism”. I actually enjoyed her memoir My Invented Country more, as it revisits some of the same settings and people as the novel but with a personal (and non-fantastical) perspective.

Brutal and beautiful; heavy and dream-like.

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how I felt about this one. When that happens, my instinct is to just start writing and see if something comes through the fog.

This is a big ambitious novel, with a pretty giant scope - a family saga of three generations, and then the political coup brutally overthrowing the (presumably Chilean, but never specified) government and turning it into a dictatorship. It's pretty dark, even before the government overthrow stuff (the patriarch Esteban Trueba spends most of the early part of the book raping anything with legs and being generally angry/violent at the state of everything). Caste stuff and serfdom stuff and government corruption stuff, and Trueba cutting off people's fingers in fits of rage. The women are the real heart of this novel, especially Trueba's granddaughter Alba, but of course she stands for everything he hates and is mostly a pretty decent character/human. But unfortunately, other than Clara the matriarch, most of the women are seen mostly through Trueba's eyes.

And okay I am mad about the ending. I understand that rape is one of the spoils of war, sure. But in Alba's epilogue, she talks about how her grandfather raped a woman named Pancha, whose grandson Esteban Garcia was part of the new government, who raped Alba. And while this is not glorified in and of itself, Alba says that maybe someday her grandson will rape Garcia's granddaughter and the cycle will perpetuate itself ... and my head might have exploded a little bit because THAT IS NOT OKAY, why would even thinking that be okay! and maybe teach your children that that violence not an acceptable means of dealing with anger??? And then I'm also mad because so much of her life was full of violence and so how can we expect people who only know violence to do any different, but RAWR.

My South American history is pretty much crap, so it shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did that there was political strife resulting in dictatorship and people being thrown in concentration camps and being killed for literally any association whatsoever with the rival government faction. If anyone has any other recommendations for reading about this history, I'm open to hearing about it!

This has been compared in other reviews to Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude, which I have not read, but I have read Marquez's other honker, Love in the Time of Cholera, and ... let's just say I wasn't impressed. So House of the Spirits doesn't exactly make me want to revisit Marquez's work. I'm glad I read this book, even if I didn't particularly enjoy it.

All the trigger warnings on this one.