4.0
The House of the Spirits
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This “spectacular…absorbing and distinguished work…is a unique achievement, both personal witness and possible allegory of the past, present, and future of Latin America” (The New York Times Book Review).
The House of the Spirits, which introduced Isabel Allende as one of the world’s most gifted storytellers, brings to life the triumphs and tragedies of three generations of the Trueba family. The patriarch Esteban is a volatile, proud man whose voracious pursuit of political power is tempered only by his love for his delicate wife Clara, a woman with a mystical connection to the spirit world. When their daughter Blanca embarks on a forbidden love affair in defiance of her implacable father, the result is an unexpected gift to Esteban: his adored granddaughter Alba, a beautiful and strong-willed child who will lead her family and her country into a revolutionary future.
One of the most important novels of the twentieth century, The House of the Spirits is an enthralling epic that spans decades and lives, weaving the personal and the political into a universal story of love, magic, and fate.
This “spectacular…absorbing and distinguished work…is a unique achievement, both personal witness and possible allegory of the past, present, and future of Latin America” (The New York Times Book Review).
The House of the Spirits, which introduced Isabel Allende as one of the world’s most gifted storytellers, brings to life the triumphs and tragedies of three generations of the Trueba family. The patriarch Esteban is a volatile, proud man whose voracious pursuit of political power is tempered only by his love for his delicate wife Clara, a woman with a mystical connection to the spirit world. When their daughter Blanca embarks on a forbidden love affair in defiance of her implacable father, the result is an unexpected gift to Esteban: his adored granddaughter Alba, a beautiful and strong-willed child who will lead her family and her country into a revolutionary future.
One of the most important novels of the twentieth century, The House of the Spirits is an enthralling epic that spans decades and lives, weaving the personal and the political into a universal story of love, magic, and fate.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe House of the Spirits Reviews
4.0
Shari
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BelievableChange and growMemorableMorally ambiguousMultilayeredStrong relationshipsAddictiveSatisfying conclusionWell-structuredAtmosphericSetting fits the storyBeautifully-writtenDescriptiveOriginalAbuseAnimal abuseChild abuseChild lossDeathDomestic violenceGriefMisogynyMurderSexual assaultViolenceWar violence
Katie
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Gabi Elizeche
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Sarit
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cerebrospinal_druid 🧠🌀🍄🥀🌲💜
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““I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously—as the three Mora sisters said, who could see the spirits of all eras mingled in space.”
For me, this was cry-on-a-plane material.
Disclosure: I adore magical realism and always seem to be a sucker for multi-generational family stuffs. Also TW: lots of sexual assault and political torture.
Though I had a slow time getting into the book (I am unsure what that’s about.. it might be more reflective of my reading capacity over the past few weeks), I am mainly left with great admiration for Allende’s poignant and flushed out storytelling and craft. Eccentric and robust characters were traced and observed over decades of their family navigating a nation’s changes. Vile patriarchy, forbidden loves, cool mysticism/intuition, voicing workers’ movements…. what’s not compelling about a book that packs this all in? It has a very marvelous, poignant, and rallying “I’m now full” effect.
This book’s brilliance, to me, was its range. Passages and anecdotes were amusing to read—cooky even (the birth of the twins with Nívea’s decapitated head watching, for example, lmao)—and then she would dip into achingly righteous, beautiful, humorous, feminist, irritating, enraging, and painful developments that stirred one’s spirit. Richness feels like an understatement. I valued the commentaries towards justice (vs charity) and the portrait of conservatism, socialism, marxism, and fascism we were presented and how they interplayed with one another (talk about intra-family political differences!!!). I know it’s not specified that the tale was set in Chile, but I gained so much knowledge about twentieth century Chilean political movements all the same. 🦊🐔 References to popular figures also leant a magnificence to the book that was really exciting. It felt timeless and awfully ever-relevant 😱.
Would highly recommend! Ty Isabel Allende, my run-on sentence Queen.”
Change and growDiverse representationMemorableMinor characters stand outMorally ambiguousMultilayeredOriginalStrong relationshipsStrong villainClever plottingSatisfying conclusionSlow start, strong finishSetting fits the storySurrealBeautifully-writtenFunnyOriginalWittyDomestic violenceExplicit sexual contentSexual assaultViolenceWar violence
About Isabel Allende
Isabel Allende, born in Peru and raised in Chile, is a novelist, feminist, and philanthropist. She is one of the most widely read authors in the world, having sold more than eighty million copies of her twenty-eight books across forty-two languages. She is the author of several bestselling and critically acclaimed books, including The Wind Knows My Name, The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, and Eva Luna. She has received fifteen honorary doctorates, been inducted into the California Hall of Fame, and received the PEN Center Lifetime Achievement Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2014, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, and in 2018, she received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. She lives in California with her husband and dogs. You can visit Isabel Allende at IsabelAllende.com or follow her on Instagram @AllendeIsabel, on Facebook at Facebook.com/IsabelAllende, and on X @IsabelAllende.
Other books by Isabel Allende
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