True, it's full of one-dimensional characters of excessive good or evil, and you can bet that none of the reactionaries are nice. In the land of repression, magic sometimes sounds like hysteria.īut while novels of this length and variety often erode the reader's patience, ''The House of the Spirits'' has the effect of wearing down one's resistance. Within the first few dozen pages of ''The House of the Spirits,'' we have a horse-sized dog named Barrabas who likes ham and ''every known type of marmalade,'' an uncle named Marcos who flies off into the clouds with the aid of a mechanical bird he has built, and a clairvoyant child named Clara who decides to become mute upon witnessing her green-haired sister's autopsy. Second, ''The House of the Spirits'' seems guilty of that extravagant and whimsical fabulousness so dear to the imagination of many South and Central American fictionalists. The reader may not be exactly sympathetic to the present ruling junta either, but he doesn't need a novel to lecture him about political repression. Moreover, it is obviously going to tell Chile's story from a point of view not exactly sympathetic to the present ruling junta. Set in an unnamed South American country, it is obviously going to tell the story of Chile's peaceful socialist revolution and violent militaristic counterrevolution -the author being a Chilean now living in Caracas, and, not incidentally, the niece of former President Salvador Allende Gossens. WITHIN a couple of dozen pages, Isabel Allende's extraordinary first novel, ''The House of the Spirits,'' found several ways to antagonize this reader.įirst, it seems to be an openly ideological novel. Translated from the Spanish by Magda Bogin.

The house of the spirits novel