Review: The House of The Spirits by Isabel Allende
The House of The Spirits by Isabel Allende (1982)
Translated from the Spanish by Magda Bogin
Magical Realism, 448 pages
The Dial Press a division of Random House, Inc.
Synopsis taken from the author’s website:
The House of The Spirits is the magnificent epic of the Trueba family – their loves, their ambitions, their spiritual quests, their relations with one another, and their participation in the history of their times, a history that becomes destiny and overtakes them all.
If word of mouth or reviews do not convince someone to read this novel, the opening sentences will. They immediately draw the reader in, and prepare them for what they are about to read:
Barrabás 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 hat fifty years later I would use her notebooks to reclaim the past and overcome terrors of my own.
