The House of the Spirits
by Isabel Allende
Isabel Allende—the world’s most popular living writer working in Spanish—published her famous magical realist novel The House of the Spirits in 1982, and found immediate global acclaim. It began, she has said, as a long letter to her dying grandfather: “He died and never received the letter, because I kept on writing and writing it. By the end of the year, I had more than 500 pages, and that was my first novel, The House of the Spirits.” The book is a family saga, unfolding over four generations in an unnamed country that appears very like Chile. In it, the youngest daughter of the del Valle family, Clara, has telekinetic and clairvoyant powers—but she cannot, in the end, save her family from violence and heartbreak. It was adapted as a film starring Meryl Streep in 1993; a new television adaptation is currently being developed for Amazon Prime.
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“Isabel Allende is a very successful novelist and one of the great storytellers of the world. The House of the Spirits was her first book. It made her world famous and, still today, I think it’s fundamental to read for anyone who wants to understand Chile and Chilean society. Because even though it’s a novel, it spans several generations of a Chilean family, and so you get a fictionalized version of the history of Chile through their story. Their quirks and foibles as individuals, as humans, are typical of Chilean society even today. So if you read this novel, you have a good foundation in the strangeness or the unique character of Chilean society.” Read more...
Natascha Scott-Stokes, Travel Writer
