A sad tale of sad lives

kw: book reviews, fiction, world fiction, spanish literature

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende has become a classic of world literature. As such, it became the subject of several months' intense attention in my son's High School Literature class. Once he finished the book, he lent it me to read. It is a classic, all right, but I question its use in a class of 17- and 18-year-olds, even a class of the smartest of the honor students. Honors-level brains do not guarantee the emotional security of a 30-year-old, and that is what it takes to survive an encounter with the Trueba family.

Even in the English translation by Magda Bogin, the book is a stylistic masterpiece. Ms Allende is justly popular in many countries. Her characterizations are clear, compelling, and ultimately devastating. The genre is a mixture of studied caricature and magical realism.

The central figure, Esteban Trueba, is not just a product of his time, early 1900s South American culture, he is an exaggeration of it. Proud to a fault, to a very big fault; incapable of thinking he could be wrong about anything, at least prior to his 80s; ultra-conservative (he makes John Birch seem akin to John Kerry); hot-tempered and viciously violent; he lives a largely sad and tragic life, driven by fear and rage.

The girl who grows up to become Trueba's wife, Clara del Valle, embodies the magical element in the book. In the US we'd call he a poltergeist, or the channeler of one. She moves the salt shaker about the table with her mind as a child, and plays the piano with its keys covered as an adult; she goes into trances and levitates with her easy chair; she predicts earthquakes and many other events with perfect precision. Her husband calls her Clara the clairvoyant.

A story that spans eighty or ninety years is complex, and a large cast of characters--several of them Trueba's bastard offspring--is tricky to follow. That it can be followed at all attests to the author's skill, providing sufficient backstory as needed in later chapters.

I can't say I enjoyed reading the book. I prefer stories in which at least someone learns something, or grows a little; stories of growth or transformation. Clara seems to need no learning, learning all from the spirits she hosts. Their children and granddaughter—the narrative viewpoint of most of the book—live in Trueba's shadow. He is rescued from seeming a total monster only by his horrific grandson, son of his first bastard child...and Trueba does reconcile with an enemy at the very end.