The House of the Spirits

by Isabel Allende

The Trueba family embodies strong feelings from the beginning of the 2 through the assassination of Allende in 1973.

• ISBN10: 0553383809
• ISBN13: 9780553383805
• Publish Date: 30 August 2005 (first published 12 April 1985)
• Publish Status: Temporarily Withdrawn
• Out of Print: 17 March 2016
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Random House USA Inc
• Imprint: Random House Inc
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 448
• Language: English

Reviews

[nannah]

Nope.
DNF @ 1%.

That’s the most pathetic percent I’ve ever left a book at, but it’s actually about 50 pages in; this book is just short of 500 pages. Sticking with it when I hate the protagonist with such a passion would be torture, classic or no classic.

Content warnings:
I know I barely scratched the surface of this thing, but
G Rroma slur
Stalking framed as being romantic

The House of the Spirits is a very famous and classic book following three generations of the Trueba family in Chile. Covering political issues, love stories, and things that can only be described as otherworldly, the book is one of the most famous and well-loved Latin American works from the twentieth century.

Again, I barely put a dent into this long book (not only is it 500 pages long, but the pages are also nearly transparent and the text is small), but what I read was enough for me to know if I could bear reading on or not. As I said, it was the protagonist that made the book unbearable. He was engaged to Rosa, an ethereal mermaid-like beauty from the Trueba family, but before he could make his fortune and marry her, she died.

His grief had him blaming her at her graveside for everything that basically went wrong in his life. I get it; grief is a powerful force and it makes people do things and think things they normally wouldn’t. But then he admits, totally heartfelt, that he even never touched other women those past years he was trying to make a fortune -- well, except for those prostitutes, lmao.

Not only this, but he was already wearing me thin, because to win her hand he literally stalked her every day, learned where she lived and when she went outside, and apparently this won her family over? The whole thing was so intensely creepy but was framed as romantic. I don’t care what “generation” this mindset is from, I just didn’t want to share 500 pages with this dude anymore. I have a life to live and other books to read.

So no thanks.

[brokentune]

"Nana had the idea that a good fright might make the child speak, and spent nine years inventing all sorts of desperate strategies for frightening Clara, the end result of which was to immunize the girl forever against terror and surprise. Soon Clara was afraid of nothing. She was unmoved by the sudden appearance of the most livid and undernourished monsters in her room, or by the knock of devils and vampires at her bedroom window. Nana dressed up as a headless pirate, as the executioner of the Tower of London, as a werewolf or a horned devil, depending on her inspiration of the moment and on the ideas she got while flipping through the pages of certain horror magazines, which she bought for this purpose and from which, although she was unable to read, she copied the illustrations. She had acquired the habit of gliding silently through the hallways and jumping at the child in the dark, howling through the doorways, and hiding live animals between her sheet, but none of this elicited so much as a peep from the little girl."

It's just so damn hard to surprise a clairvoyant.

This was my second reading of The House of the Spirits and, if anything, I enjoyed the magical elements of the book much more on this visit.
A re-visit.
A re-visit, spending this last week with the Trueba family, who in turn are re-visited by their past, which Allende spins into the narrative with such ease that reading the story of the different generations made me wonder at every turn of the page what happens next, and what happens to this or that character. Throw in the unspecified political and historical context of the story and I was hooked. Again, I think the second read was more engaging for me than the first in this respect, too. I guess, when I read the book for the first time, I was looking for clear-cut references and didn't appreciate the intention of the book as much, but some of the beauty and sadness of the book lies in the possibility that it may have been the story of many families, not just that of the Truebas.