Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits: Magic & Memory

Isabel Allende — The House of the Spirits

The House of the Spirits, published in 1982, marks the emergence of Isabel Allende (born 1942 in Peru) in Latin American letters; she became a true literary phenomenon of recent decades. A member of a well-known Chilean family (her uncle, Chilean president Salvador Allende, was overthrown by Pinochet in 1973), her cosmopolitan upbringing and the fact that she has lived in many countries make her literature a symbiosis between the native—the great Latin American literature of the 20th century—and external influences and very different narrative modes.

The House of the Spirits, which remains her best-known work, is a narrative difficult to place in an increasingly complex literary landscape. If we follow chronological classification, she can be considered a member of the 'post-boom' (which follows the paths and reflects the success of the great storytellers of the sixties). However, the novel has two notable features: on the one hand, it is heir to the magical realism of Juan Rulfo (Pedro Páramo) and Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude), where the fantastic is set in a realistic register and presented as unremarkable; on the other hand, this story of the Trueba family over four generations adopts a functional language and communicative concerns, including experimentalism, metafiction (a novel reflecting on itself), and linguistic complexities that might alienate the reader.

Historical and Literary Context

The novel displays thematic and formal features of contemporary narrative. In the mid-seventies there was talk of the end of the Boom. The senior authors (Cortázar, Rulfo, Borges, Sábato) and even the younger ones (García Márquez, Vargas Llosa) were established in the canon and seemed to have reached the summit of the complex novel (Cortázar's Rayuela as a paradigm of modernity). But some transitional novelists (Manuel Puig, Severo Sarduy) continued the process of linguistic inquiry and structural enrichment, contrary to the old realist tradition (or in pursuit of a reality not only apparent). The next generation does not respond to a homogeneous creative impulse nor to common models: Allende has nothing to do with Bolaño or Iwasaki. However, a previous attempt to recover thematic traditions is visible (the dictator novel, the telluric novel) as well as narratological traditions (among them, a new kind of magical realism). But all this—and here we speak of a common denominator—does not abandon the purpose of reaching the general public, on the basis of market realities; quality and popular appeal are not irreconcilable. In this sense, The House of the Spirits acquires a paradigmatic status that explains its extraordinary success.