Review: The House Of The Spirits by Isabel Allende (translated by Magda Bogin)

At the pointy end of this novel set in an unnamed South American country (it’s Chile), the country becomes increasingly polarised, politics increasingly rancorous. For the first time, it seems a left-wing president might win, known in the novel as the Candidate, and known to us as Salvador Allende, the author’s first cousin once removed. The entrenched powers that be (the landholders, the businessmen) chuck a massive dummy spit and bring in foreign strategists to undermine the new government, with predictably horrifying results. “Jakarta” appears graffitied on the streets of the city; “I had a feeling things weren’t turning out the way we had planned,” says the novel’s narrator with typical understatement, so you know things have gone catastrophically wrong.

The scenes are striking, because they are clear-sighted on the machinations of tyranny, but also because they are so recognisable right now, from the USA to the UK to the streets of France. Even if political polarisation may be overstated, it can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Isabel Allende’s project is to untangle the resentment at the source of these divisions, conceiving of them as a curse passed down the generations.

She does so through through the history of a family that mirrors the history of a country, a technique used by her magic realist contemporaries Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie. Allende’s innovation here is her feminist satire of the machismo that pervades those novels. At the heart of The House Of The Spirits is the patriarch to end all patriarchs, the ruthless, brutal, defiantly ridiculous Estebán Trueba. He is something of a rude bait-and-switch: we are first introduced to the de Valle sisters, the younger clairvoyant Clara and the older green-haired Rosa. Trueba is Rosa’s fiancé, toiling away in the mines in the north of the country, hoping to strike his fortune. Trueba, we soon learn, is the narrator of this sorry tale. “In my generation,” he tells us forebodingly, when he is still youthful and hopeful enough to earn our sympathies, “We used to distinguish between decent women and all the rest, and we also divided up the decent ones into our own and others”.

It’s the early 20th Century, around World War I. When Rosa dies after drinking poisoned brandy intended for her father, Trueba heads for the hills in grief, to his family’s estancia Tres Marias. There he rapes his way through the daughters of his tenants, moving on from one to another when they turn 15, “sowing the entire region with his bastard offspring, reaping hatred”. He does so for ten years, before returning to the city, where the now of-age Clara agrees to marry him, speaking for the first time after spending a decade in silence since witnessing the violation of her sister’s corpse. Estebán’s reverence for Clara may seem at odds with his character, but in its own way is as dehumanising as his treatment of peasant girls.

So Clara and Estebán build a home, with their grand house in the city and the estate in the country. They have children, then grandchildren. Each generation of daughters falls forbidden-ly for dashing, rebellious youths who are fighting the oppression personified by their patriarch. If the novel feels a little episodic, it is because in marrying a people to their history there are certain beats Allende must strike, whether earthquakes or coup d’états. This is a story that must wrestle with fate, and finds that we are at its whim. It lives in the tension between individual and collective responsibility for atrocity, aligning us through its narrative with a perpetrator and a victim. Its ending is as brutally truncated as Allende’s own experience of Chile’s history, concluding in the midst of Pinochet’s dictatorship with no end in sight, except the relief of hindsight that it did end. Chile is a haunted house in this novel, haunted by the oppressed and marginalised, the disappeared and the downtrodden.

Gay rating: 3/5 for minor queer-coded characters. A lot of queer slurs used (this is a novel about patriarchy after all).