The House of the Spirits in The Roundtable

Dec 18, 2021 Henk rated it liked it · review of another edition

Moving from meandering rich people problems, family conflicts and people that just don’t change, to three absolutely brutal final chapters set during the rise to dictatorship in Chile
You always think it will happen somewhere else, till it happens here

If The House of the Spirits would have been completely focused on the events of 1973 this would have been a definite 4 star book for me. The first 2/3 of the book felt like boring rich people problems with a pinch of magic: the main character was co Moving from meandering rich people problems, family conflicts and people that just don’t change, to three absolutely brutal final chapters set during the rise to dictatorship in Chile
You always think it will happen somewhere else, till it happens here

If The House of the Spirits would have been completely focused on the events of 1973 this would have been a definite 4 star book for me. The first 2/3 of the book felt like boring rich people problems with a pinch of magic: the main character was completely unclear for me, as was the world in general. We have unnatural beautiful people, with green hair, oracles and enormous poverty and wealth disparities. Initially the book feels like a pastiche on the writing style of One Hundred Years of Solitude, but soon it becomes clear that the magical powers of the characters are no more than interesting asides to the personal conflicts.

Paternalistic (and in general patriarchy oriented) society, including rape and needing to earn before the possibility of marrying form an important part, which gave me quite a surprise when I found out that large part of the book was actually set in the WW2 period. Strangely enough while reading I was reminded of Capital and Ideology of Thomas Piketty who has as one of his thesis the marriage of the educated left and the merchant right comes to mind. This alliance is very clear in The House of the Spirits, with violence and conflict reverberating through time and generations.

The personalities of the colorful family around Clara, Blanca and Alba seem fixed in terms of character, and they don’t seem to (be able to) learn from anything that happen to them. This might be surprisingly realistic but is also very dull in a sense. Everyone is described in long, winding passages, and turn out to be rather crazy in one way or another. And there is a lot of foreshadowing going on.

Around the final 1/3 of the book more dark themes take a prominent role. There is implied child incest with a nephew, abortions, and then the postwar political upheaval leading to the dictatorship.
The doomed love galore is traded in into for book burnings, torture, concentration camps, amputation and rape. All the Esteban monologues were in my view quite annoying, except for the last heartbreaking one, showing Isabel Allende to be quite a competent writer.

The more recent The Twilight Zone of Nona Fernández also covers the same topic, but then the fall of the dictatorship instead of the rise. In general the writing reminded me both of Carlos Ruiz Zafón and the historic parts of Everything Is Illuminated from Jonathan Safran Foer. An interesting read with more depth than I imagined when I was halfway into the book; it's not often I am so surprised by the direction a book takes. ...more

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Aug 28, 2017 El rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: biddles, 20th-centurylit-late, cultural-studies-and-other, 1001-books-list, fantasy, put-it-in-your-journal, anarchism-revolutions, hear-me-roar-and-gender, library-borrow

Barrabas came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. She was already in the habit of writing down important matters, and afterward, when she was mute, she also recorded trivialities, never suspecting that fifty years later I would use her notebooks to reclaim the past and overcome terrors of my own.

Thus begins Isabel Allende's debut novel from 1982 (English translation 1985). It amazes me that this is an author's first novel. It read to me as someone who has been doing

Barrabas came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. She was already in the habit of writing down important matters, and afterward, when she was mute, she also recorded trivialities, never suspecting that fifty years later I would use her notebooks to reclaim the past and overcome terrors of my own.

Thus begins Isabel Allende's debut novel from 1982 (English translation 1985). It amazes me that this is an author's first novel. It read to me as someone who has been doing this for a long time, writing and publishing and spilling her guts out onto the page for all to read. This didn't exhibit any of the trepidation or self-consciousness that often comes with first novels.

It also occurred to me that this may not have been the first time I read this book. If you were to ask me before this reading about some of the events in the book, I would not have been able to answer you, leaving me to think I hadn't read the book before. But occasionally there was a phrase or a turn of passage that seemed so familiar to me (a lizard on a dish, mythological creatures in a tapestry) that I could have been 100% certain I had read this before.

Regardless, the timing of this reading couldn't have been more perfect. If I did read it years ago, it didn't make nearly as much of an impression on me as it did today, so for that reason alone I consider this my first time reading this book.

I read somewhere that Allende was inspired to write this book upon the death of her elderly and beloved grandfather. I found this touching, but it becomes a bit muddled in my mind while reading and discover the patriarch here was this really god-awful brute of a beast. Was this the man Allende wanted to immortalize? Was she tapping into her own grandfather's life and experiences when writing this novel? Certainly she did dip into her own personal history for the writing of this - the political events that occurred around her growing up, in and outside of the house, cannot be denied. Allende was very informed politically, though a brief look at her family explains that pretty well.

So what part of this book is true, outside of the political context, and which is fiction? It's hard to say. I'm always drawn to a strong family mythology, and this is one of the strongest. The women in this book are powerful, beautiful, and strong. We have two in the family lineage with green hair, as though they were mermaids, mythological creatures of their own. Each woman has her own battles in her life, her own loves and desires and passions. There are men here too, orbiting these women and affecting their daily lives by - let's just be real - getting in the fucking way as often happens. They are nasty creatures for the most part, but for better or worse the women (mostly, though not always) love them.

My assumption is that Allende herself is the Alba character, the youngest of the women we see in this book, and her relationship with her grandfather - the man who set all of this drama and trauma in motion in the very beginning of the book, the real pig of a human being - is unlike that relationship between him and any other female character in this book. I find that appealing. Perhaps I could relate to that in a way, having forged a relationship with my own grandfather that was unlike the relationship he had with any of his children. We had a mutual respect that I don't know he ever experienced with his own daughters, but isn't that always the way it goes? Life and time cause people to chill the fuck out, or they burn out all their negativity energy on the people who deserve it least (in this case, their very own children), or maybe they just, in their own way, grow up. It's difficult, however, because I know the stories, and I know how much hurt existed, but that didn't match the relationship I was able to have with the man. It took me years to work that out in my mind - was I a traitor to my family? Was I a traitor to myself?

Families are full of stories like these. We all have this convoluted and complicated histories. There are people in our pasts we wish hadn't existed, but then we wouldn't exist either. It's an ongoing story, our family histories, and that's why I'm most drawn to stories like these, these magical, sprawling, beautifully-told stories (in the wreckage of all the ugliness and violence). I felt a connection to each of the women in Allende's world which she created, whether it's true to her own family story or not.

She had brutes in her past as well, but thank god for them for contributing to the creation of this amazing author. ...more

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Jul 19, 2013 Irene rated it really liked it

This is a powerful family saga, filled with pain and tenderness, brutality and wisdom, terrific dry humor and sharp social critique. We are given three generations of a family filled with idiosyncratic characters whose rise and fall parallel the political shifts in a fictional South American country that could easily be the Chili of the author’s nationality.

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