A review by luxxybee97
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

    At the start, it is hard not to read The House of the Spirits and draw inevitable comparisons with One Hundred Years of Solitude. Let’s just get that out there. I find it easier to do so when Isabel Allende (as far as I can tell) has acknowledged the inspiration, but the similarities are striking. The multi-generational sagas of two families, whether Chilean or Colombian, undergoing changes in the world around them with the rise and fall of their individual and collective stars – all against a backdrop of hidden affairs, extraordinary violence, and magic that just won’t quite accept that it’s not supposed to exist. Although I do think One Hundred Years of Solitude is, quite simply, an incomparably well-written work, The House of the Spirits is in its own right an engrossing read, especially when you consider that it’s Allende’s debut novel. The prose is consistently solid, often with flashes of great imagination, images and metaphors that on the whole work and only very sparingly feel a little too forced or clunky. Like with García Márquez, though, the strength is in the characters, and Allende also has a knack for weaving a tapestry of many figures who all feel individually fleshed-out, and all have a role to play in this story. Esteban Trueba, for example, is one of the most interesting characters I’ve read about in such a long time – his inclination to violence, his rages, his adamant belief that he is on the right path beginning to unravel as he sees the consequences of his actions unfolding around him. Or Clara, the fey enchantress who can exist in the ether and at the same time, when she really has to, get her hands down in the dirt and lift up everyone else. I could mention every character individually, but the end result is the same – for however long they are with us, Allende takes the time to delve into what makes them tick, and it lends a lot of strength to a novel that could have easily been populated by mostly one-dimensional stock figures. 

 

   However, what I think really solidified The House of the Spirits as a really compelling novel for me was the gradual shift in its tone away from the magical realism that defines so much of its early half into what is, really, quite a brutal account of the early days of the Chilean dictatorship. It becomes less rooted in the past and more focused in the present, at least at its time of publication, and Allende’s own experience of living in this dictatorship, having to write about members of her own family under this façade of fiction, gives the book a bite that I wasn’t expecting it to have. It goes down a completely different direction to One Hundred Years of Solitude, ending on a note that is hopeful yet bittersweet.