Isabel Allende, "House of the Spirits"

House of the Spirits (1982) was a huge international best-seller and catapulted Isabel Allende to fame, but I did not love it. It has quite a few good moments, but it does not hang together, and I was left rather puzzled about all the fuss.

House of the Spirits is two quite separate books mashed together. The first is what happens when an imaginative young woman reads One Hundred Years of Solutude and thinks, "I'm going to write my own magical family chronicle, except with MORE magic, and a lot of sex!" The second is a graphic account of the Pinochet coup of 1973. While the characters in the two stories were the same, I thought that they did not belong in the same book.

The family saga introduces us to a wealthy Chilean family and in particular two of its daughters, Rosa and Clara. Clara is a strange person who spends much of her time and energy communing with the spirit world, which is sometimes portrayed as a rather foolish eccentricity but at other times seems very powerful and useful. A man comes along, named Esteban Trueba, and he first courts Rosa but then ends up marrying Clara. Trueba is smart, hard-working, brutal, and vain, so he ends up very rich and eventually enters conservative party politics. Both he and Clara are interesting characters, but their marriage makes no sense and while there is nothing inherently improbable about such a marriage, theirs bored me. As Chilean politics heats up, with the rise of a powerful Marxist party and the intensely angry reaction this inspires in the ruling elite, Trueba puts himself forward as a leader of the conservatives but his and Clara's children mostly gravitate to the left. 

Then comes the coup, and we get an entirely different story, a sort of bearing-witness to the horrors of the time. Which were indeed horrific, but perhaps not the best material for a magical-realism novel. One interesting point is that the old conservative Trueba ends up hating the Pinochet regime as much as his leftist children do, because the new rulers have no interest in preserving the genteel, refined, upper-class world that he loves. They keep doing things that simply ought not to be done. I found the leftist children mostly rather shallow, lots of freedom and equality talk but no interest in five-year plans, and I kept getting a sense that we were supposed to admire the young leftists mainly because they were sexy and cool.

Thinking over the book, I again remind myself that there are many fine moments, some of them quite magical. Both Clara and Trueba are good characters. I read the book avidly and finished it quickly. But it never measured up to my idea of what it should be, and the drastic shift in the mood when the coup happens put me off. Maybe the point was to show that the coup was a drastic shift in mood for everyone in Chile, and maybe that is true, but truth and good fiction are two entirely different things.