Re-read review: The House of the Spirits, by Isabelle Allende
This was the book that first introduced me to the idea of magical realism. I read it when I was about fifteen or so and found it to be equal parts disturbing and enchanting. Doing this third or fourth re-read soon after my analysis of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’, the influences of Garcia Marquez’s most famous work are unmistakable. We have, for example, a narrative that follows multiple generations of a family which includes members who can see ghosts, members who are overly enthusiastic about new technology, an ethereally beautiful but short-lived girl, and some deeply flawed men, and which offers commentary on capitalist oppression and historical conflicts between Liberals and Conservatives in Latin America. However, Allende was already putting her own spin on this formula and went on to develop an even more distinctive voice. It is hard to believe that this was her first published novel. Even if I prefer some of her later books, this one is still masterful.
Like ‘Solitude’, this narrative weaves together the mundane and the fantastical without a change in tone. However, Allende makes less attempt to sound neutral on matters of moral and political significance. For example, while the book never gets preachy, the distinction between, say, the depiction of an older person taking a sexual interest in a minor and condoning that behavior (or treating it as another weird and quirky incident), is considerably clearer. This is particularly important due to the introduction of a first-person perspective from Esteban Trueba that alternates with the third-person-omniscient narrative1. Trueba is an awful person – serial rapist awful2 – but is of course only partially aware of how terrible he is. He insists, for instance, that he is a self-made man, completely forgetting that he inherited social relationships that would help him get credit, land, and a confidence in his right to do things with that land. We therefore get to watch him ruin his own life, piece by piece. He is helplessly in love with his wife, Clara, but to him this means possession and control – something he’s never managed to achieve with her. He gradually drives away her and most of his family, becomes a laughingstock even among his fellow conservative politicians3, and finally watches the military coup he encouraged and the illegitimate grandson who he helped join the police destroy almost everything and everyone he has left. Old Trueba does start to have a change of heart at that:
“The country filled with men in uniform, with war machines, flags, hymns, and parades… 'Bread, circuses, and something to worship are all they need' the senator concluded, regretting in his conscience that there should be a lack of bread.”
He gets an ending that is more positive than I’d like, but the same events are part of his granddaughter’s hopeful ending, so I’m not sure exactly how I’d change it.
1. This, and the occasional “I” that is too even-tempered to be Trueba, we discover at the end to be the voice of a different character!
2. It’s a droit de seigneur thing; He sees peasants as essentially his property, with feelings that are not worth worrying about.
3. “Relax, hombre…Marxism doesn’t stand a chance in Latin America. Don’t you know it doesn’t allow for the magical side of things?”
Fortunately, the whole book isn’t about this wretched man! Clara’s parents, the Del Valles, clearly love and support each other. Her mother is active in the suffragette movement; Clara notices the oddity of wealthy women preaching to factory workers about oppression. However, she continues the tradition of mixing charitable giving and political education, telling her daughter Blanca: “This is to assuage our conscience, darling…They don’t need charity; they need justice.” Her father’s career as a Liberal politician is cut short when Rosa – an ethereal beauty with green hair and golden eyes who was Esteban’s first fiancé – is killed by some poisoned brandy meant for him; Severo Del Valle’s grief for his daughter and his self-blame feel very real. Her uncle is an explorer and lover of all things new, who for a time sets up a fortune-telling gimmick, with young Clara the Clairvoyant whispering hints of the future in his ear. Blanca is considered the most normal person in either family; her primary arc concerns her intense childhood friendship turned love affair with the peasant revolutionary songwriter Pedro Tercero Garcia. This is the origin of Alba, who inherits Rosa’s green hair, Blanca's passionate nature, Clara's quiet sense of justice, and Esteban's stubbornness. Esteban’s sister Férula seems like she is going to be merely a bitter spinster like Amaranta from ‘Solitude’, but she ends up being a considerably more likeable character. Even Tránsito Soto, one of the scrawny young prostitutes Esteban visits – again, like many of the men in ‘Solitude’ – gets her own story arc.
Férula, I believe, is the result of Allende quietly trying her hand at a sympathetic LGBT+ character. When we first meet her, she is petulantly complaining about how she’s spent her whole youth caring for their ailing mother. However, she had a high-born name and a stately beauty – she probably could have snagged a rich man who could afford to pay a nurse if she really tried. Instead, every Friday she went to the tenements and knelt in the street, praying for people who considered that an insult, and as she prayed: “A summer heat was pressing sin between her thighs – take from me this chalice, Lord, that her groin was bursting into hellfire: flames of fear, of holiness, ay, Our Father, don’t let me fall into temptation.” What kind of temptation specifically? It doesn’t say, but when Clara kisses her on the cheek and announces that they will be like sisters, Férula’s pride melts and she begins to weep: “She could not remember the last time anyone had spontaneously touched her.” When Clara becomes pregnant “Férula’s affection for her sister-in-law became a passion…She bathed her in jasmine and basil water…and brushed her hair until it was as soft and shiny as an underwater plant.” She is delighted by any moment she can spend with the spirit-distracted Clara, and “when the married couple retired to their rooms, she was overwhelmed by a peculiar hatred she could not explain” – but which context suggests to be sexual jealousy, mixed with the thought that her brother in no way deserves this woman! It is not clear if Clara returned any such feelings, but she seems to understand them and to sympathize with Férula’s loneliness: “Only with Clara could she be herself…Clara wrote in her notebooks that Férula loved her far more deeply than she deserved or than she could ever hope to repay.” When Esteban finds Férula curled up in Clara’s bed (lest she be frightened by earthquake tremors) and kicks her out of the house with various homophobic insults, that’s the moment that loses him any possibility of Clara’s love. Clara only finds Férula again when she gets a vision of her ghost. Telling Esteban and the priest to wait outside, she washes her sister-in-law’s body as carefully as Férula once did for her, telling her all the news, including: “the hydrangeas you planted…turned out beautiful…and every time I arrange them in a vase I think of you, but…I always think of you, Férula, because the truth is that since you left me no one has ever loved me as you did.” Férula is thus ultimately played for tragedy, like so many queer or queer-coded characters before and after4. Allende may have thought better of this in retrospect, because a few years later in ‘Eva Luna’ she created the unforgettable trans woman Mimí who, while facing incredible hardships, ultimately gets a happy ending on her own terms!
4. Also, I’m not sure what exactly the intent was with Blanca’s husband Jean, but as with certain characters in ‘Solitude’ the book leans into the “effete European” stereotype too much here. I never understood why Blanca sticks with this marriage arranged to cover her pregnancy after finding out he does cocaine and opium and illegally smuggles archaeological artifacts but runs away on finding naughty photos of his mixed-gender Indian entourage. Girl: You were HAPPY he didn’t want to sleep with you! What does it matter if he has his own thing going? Provided consent of the Indians can be established, of course…but that’s not what she seems upset about!
Clara is an interesting character. While she seems to float above reality much of the time – literally: she can levitate chairs! – whispering to her spirits, as we see with her understanding of Férula, she pays attention where it matters. When a massive earthquake levels the hacienda, badly wounding Esteban (and making his temper even worse), she comes out of the clouds entirely to run the recovery efforts, taking over the domestic matters she’d previously had no interest in. In the process she gets quite close to Pedro Segundo, the lead peasant and Pedro Tercero’s father. Though she is later referred to as his mistress, it isn’t clear if they ever slept together; what matters is the trust they built working together, and the intimacy they feel sharing a silent cup of tea at the end of the day. Those are things she never had with Esteban Trueba. She married him because she foresaw she was fated to do so, that she had an important role to play in the story of this family. At first one might think that her calmness in disagreeing with her tempestuous husband comes from knowing that he’d never hurt her. That is not actually true: After the earthquake she starts to show fear in his presence, but still continues to do what needs to be done. When she stands up for Blanca and her love affair, he actually hits Clara hard enough to knock out her front teeth. Esteban immediately regrets what he’s done, but it is too late; Clara doesn’t divorce him, but she never speaks to him directly again. The effect she had in bringing the house life is most evident in the way everything crumbles after her passing.
There’s no shortage of female characters in this book who show their strength less in defying traditional femininity and more in how they use it – sometimes simply to endure, sometimes to effect change. Alba may have come to leftist politics through her boyfriend Miguel, but even when he leaves to join the guerillas and refuses to take her or tell her where he’s going, for her own protection, she continues to oppose the military regime on her own. She smuggles food out of her grandfather’s house and refugees in, putting herself at risk for her own values, not Miguel’s. The young prostitute Tránsito Soto uses the 50 pesos Esteban gives her to move to the city, and the next time he sees her she’s planning to start a cooperative of both female and male sex workers so that they won’t be exploited by pimps and madams. This proves wildly successful, and many are able to retire by the time the sexual revolution prompts Tránsito to turn the brothel into a love hotel instead. In the course of her business, she naturally acquires a lot of connections with - and dirty secrets of - military leaders, and so is able to play a crucial role in helping Esteban and Miguel (an unlikely alliance!) to rescue Alba when the police finally come for her. In the prison, the women help each other where they can, tending to each other’s injuries and singing to annoy the guards and bring hope to themselves and to their men on the other side of the walls and fences. When she is freed and left in a garbage dump, Alba is met by “one of those stoical, practical women of our country, the kind of woman who has a child with every man who passes through her life and, on top of that, takes in other people’s abandoned children…and anybody who needs a mother, a sister, or an aunt…I told her she had run an enormous risk rescuing me, and she smiled. It was then that I understood the days of Colonel García and all those like him are numbered, because they have not been able to destroy the spirit of these women.” Hell yeah! While women’s roles and activism should definitely not be restricted within traditional boundaries - nor should unending self-sacrifice be the responsibility of a single gender - I also think the actions that draw power from traditional roles often deserve more respect than they get. This aspect of the book reminded me of the Argentinian “Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo”, who in 1977 started marches and sit-ins to demand the return, or at least news of, their “disappeared” children, and indeed all the victims of that military dictatorship, and didn’t stop until the Trial of the Juntas in 19855. But I’m getting ahead of myself!
5. Actually, they didn’t really stop even then. One faction focused on legislation and continuing the original mission, while another became more radical. And they also established a newspaper, a radio station, and ran a program that as of 2011 had completed 5,600 housing units for former slum residents.
The last third of the book, in which a Socialist candidate wins the election but is overthrown by a military dictatorship, hits hard because it is personal to the author. “The Candidate/The President” is a clear stand-in for her father’s cousin, Salvador Allende, who sought to nationalize major industries and expand education before being overthrown by General Pinochet in a CIA-backed coup. Isabelle, like Alba, helped get those on the junta’s wanted list out of the country until her mother and stepfather were nearly assassinated and they all had to hurriedly emigrate themselves. This book was published in 1982, only nine years after the coup. This section also felt personal for me, now even more than it did on my first reading. My husband’s parents were Uruguayan socialists who were arrested when that country fell to a military dictatorship in the ‘80s, and later moved to Australia with the help of the UN. My Cuban grandmother wasn't super political, but she must have seen something like the poster Esteban Trueba has printed portraying “a full-bellied, lonely woman vainly attempting to wrest her son from the arms of a Communist soldier who was dragging him off to Moscow”. She left for the US when she heard rumors that good students (like my dad) would be sent away to Russia. Ironically, it was that move that ended up tearing them apart for years, not because of any deliberately cruel policies like the recent family separations at the border, but through the invisible hand of the market - a traumatic event for both of them. There are some references, of course, that I only understand now, like “Djakarta” painted on a wall as a warning, referring to the 1965 mass killings in Indonesia at the start of Suharto’s three decade rule. I grew up with the idea that any country can turn authoritarian (with either left or right economic characteristics), but the political polarization and the “it can’t happen here” and “where did all these fascists come from all of a sudden?” sentiments will also now feel uncomfortably familiar to anyone who’s lived in the US for the past 5 years. As the last election approached, my family discussed our fears of a coup; I said I was concerned, but that it was unlikely because Trump insulted the military almost as much as he praised them. I was right, as it turned out…but while the police and military didn’t support the storming of the capitol early this year as institutions, the slow response and the number of people in that crowd who were current or former cops and soldiers is worrying.
Overall recommendation: I feel I should give a content warning here for police brutality, torture, a rather vivid depiction of an abortion, some insensitive wording about disabled people (characters’ actions and overall attitudes are often supportive), pedophilia, and hints of necrophilia and incest (nothing much actually happens), as well as the previously mentioned rape, homophobic language, and the verbally and/or physically abusive behavior of Esteban Trueba toward everyone except Alba. However, as I mentioned, I first read this book when I was fifteen. While I did have a few nightmares, I was not only not scarred for life but immediately decided I had to read more from this author and more Latin American literature in general! So, unless you have suffered a traumatic personal experience with one or more of the above, you can probably read this book safely, even if not comfortably.
'The House of the Spirits' packs in an amazing amount of joy and pain, good love stories and toxic ones, history and fantasy, in under 500 pages, all wrapped up in language that ranges from the beautifully sensual to the brutal. The dark episodes are not gratuitous; Allende is always making a point or planting a plot seed that will bear fruit later, and she doesn’t linger on the pain longer than needed to accomplish that. For all its darkness, the tale is ultimately a hopeful one.
