Context
One of the most successful contemporary Latin
American woman novelists, Isabel Allende was born in 1942.
Although she was born in Lima, Peru, Allende is Chilean. As a child,
she traveled throughout Latin America and beyond, thanks to her
father and stepfather's diplomatic careers. In 1962,
Isabel Allende married Manuel Frias. Allende soon gave birth to
their daughter Paula and their son Nicolas. Allende worked as a
journalist for a number of magazines and newspapers in Chile beginning
in 1967. Her uncle Salvador Allende became,
in 1970, the first socialist to be elected
president of Chile. In 1973 Salvador Allende
was assassinated in a military coup led by General Augusta Pinochet.
Due to increasing political tensions in Chile, in 1975,
Allende and her family fled to Venezuela. She lived there for thirteen
years, continuing to work as a journalist, and beginning to write
novels. In 1987, Allende and Frias were divorced.
A year later, Allende married Willie Gordon in San Francisco and
settled down in nearby San Rafael, California. In 1992, her
daughter Paula died of porphyria.
Written and first published in Spanish in 1982, The
House of the Spirits, was Allende's first book. It received
enormous critical and popular acclaim and, in 1985,
was translated into English. In 1993, it
was released as a film with a star-studded cast. Following The House
of The Spirits, Allende has written numerous other novels, including The
Stories of Eva Luna,The Infinite Plan, and
a biography of her daughter, Paula. She is still
writing today.
Many elements in The House of the Spirits are
based on Allende's own life. The political events in the unnamed
country in the novel are quite similar to those that occurred in
Chile. As Allende later explained in Paula, many
of the characters in The House of the Spirits are
based on members of her own family. In fact, The House of the
Spirits began as a letter Allende wrote to a dying uncle.
However, The House of the Spirits is a novel, and
there is no exact correlation between it and any real events or
characters.
The House of the Spirits is a prime example
of magical realism, along with Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One
Hundred Years of Solitude. Primarily a Latin American tradition,
magical realism is characterized by the simple, straightforward
presentation of strange, magical events. For example, characteristics
such as Clara's clairvoyance are compared to her brother's lameness.
The characters in magical realist fiction experience and accept
the unbelievable with calm rationality. When Clara dreams that her
mother's severed head is missing, for example, she borrows a car
and goes to find it, and then she puts it in a hatbox and forgets
about it. Magical realist novels are often long family sagas, told
with little respect for clear temporal succession. They often employ
strategies of foreshadowing and repetition which are prevalent in The
House of the Spirits, especially in Clara's predictions
of future events and in the recurrence of the names Pedro and Esteban.
