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A review by karolyne
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
5.0
i had to sleep before writing this review because i could not understand process everything i had read. magical realism often ends in a negative —and sometimes even cynic —tone so i appreciated how this book gives hope to us. the development of the characters is so incredible and the events happening one after the other don’t seem rushed or summarized. everything happens just at the pace it should.
my only problem is how often the author would foreshadow very explicitly that something would happen. even though i personally don’t like it, i don’t mind when it happens once or twice, but including it in almost every chapter started to slightly annoy me.
“[…] but i know it was not i: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day i could use them. i write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously”
my only problem is how often the author would foreshadow very explicitly that something would happen. even though i personally don’t like it, i don’t mind when it happens once or twice, but including it in almost every chapter started to slightly annoy me.
“[…] but i know it was not i: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day i could use them. i write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously”