The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

Sometimes I get to the end of a book and the last two or three pages feel perfect. This is one of those books. For a book with such a wide scope, spanning generations, it was remarkable how well those final pages drew everything together, and when I closed the book I wanted to just sit there and think for a little while.

The House of the Spirits is Allende's first published, and she's gone on to write a great deal more since it was published in 1982. A few years ago I read Zorro, one of her more recent novels, which was as beautifully written and epic as House of the Spirits, but to me The House of the Spirits feels more personal.

The novel follows a single family in a South American country that is never named. (I think it's modeled on Chile, but I don't think it was necessarily meant to be Chile specifically. I could be wrong). The story follows the patriarch of the family, Esteban Trueba, but it weaves around all the members of his family enough that he is not the protagonist. Trueba himself is impassioned, violent, and stern, and Allende's treatment is both unforgiving and compassionate. That there is the strength and the heart of the book.

There's not really a story for me to summarize. We see the family through the social changes that are occurring in their nation, but the story is about the people and not the politics. There is no beginning, middle, and end; the narrative progresses in the way that life progresses. Allende incorporates elements of magical realism into her writing, and I found that the first chapter reminiscent of the writing of Gabriel García Márquez. Although it is present through the very end, the magic becomes gradually less prominent as the book progresses, and I think this transition was very deliberate, to mark the passage of time from past to present, memory and myth to modern lived experience, without ever setting one end up as less true or valid than the other.

I loved this book. There was so much to uncover in the language and writing and story and characters, and even though it took me some time to finish, I felt entranced as I read. It's certainly not an airplane book, but I would highly recommend it.