The House of the Spirits
By Isabel Allende
Picking up an Isabel Allende novel is not a light task to undertake. In the expanse of just one of her books, she writes decades, and several generations of complicated, diverse characters. The House of the Spirits is a feat to be upheld for the sheer amount of story she covers, and that’s saying nothing of the actual quality of her writing. She creates interest in the most insignificant detail a distant cousin mentions in passing, bringing back something like their favorite type of food hundreds of pages later as they bleed to death in the same shirt they were wearing in that first scene. She leaves these breadcrumbs behind as if they’re nothing, when they supply the interest of an entire novel in just a few short paragraphs. I am forever impressed by her ability to maintain such high interest for the most insignificant of details.
For her first book, Allende already has masterful control over characters and their passage through time. The amount of life that transpires while story unfolds is daunting in itself, far too much to take in in one linear ride. This makes her intersecting plots and multiple perspectives all the more fascinating. It’s hard to imagine knowing a family of people as well as the several branching trees she writes about in The House of the Spirits, but they are given such an intimate history that it’s as if they grew up as your next door neighbors. Every name on the page is another opportunity to draw you deeper into her world, ensnaring you into a web of interest until you have no choice but to see how it ends. I marvel at how she plainly tells you when or how someone will die, as if you already knew it. She leaves details like the clothes they were wearing as a bullet ricocheted through their body, so deep inside of incongruous stories that you can forget them until they come back with jarring relevancy.
Perhaps most worthy of praise is how charming she manages to make all of her characters. One of the most chauvinistic, self-serving characters is humbled again and again, brought to his knees in the face of all he has wrought, and still there is a sad sort of joy for the meager moments of happiness at the end of his life. The antagonist of the back half of the book earns his title as the most evil man to walk through the pages of The House of the Spirits. You are never rooting for him, but it’s hard to be surprised at how he’s turned out, after the life you’ve been presented with up to that point. I had the thought a few times that Allende’s thesis seems to be “in every family there is one good man, and every other is worse than the most hated bug”. Meanwhile, the women are complicated angels, who are constantly bucking the roles that society requires of them. Mothers are imperfect, daughters in high society join the socialist revolution, women who should be good christians live their lives as wandering bohemians or practitioners of the paranormal. Whatever the plot of Allende’s novel, you can be certain it will be filled to the brim with memorable characters and wondrous women.
The performance in the audiobook of The House of the Spirits leaves nothing to be desired. Marisol Ramirez narrating the bulk of the story is complimented by Thom Rivera reflecting as Esteban Trueba. The two conflicting interpretations of story coming to a humble understanding by the end is made so much more poignant by the dual-narrators. Ramirez brings a diverse cast of characters to life, describing beautiful and horrific experiences in equal measure, with the same dedication she does for every minute of her narration. Rivera plays the charming, sometimes-villain well, allowing Estaban to be monster and man at once, never misinterpreting character for the sake of sympathy, earning it all the same.
The second half of the book takes a turn one might not expect from the beginning. It is much darker in tone than I was anticipating, though the transition from high stakes family drama to bloody military coup happens as naturally as any could. Allende’s writing never falters, no matter the subject matter or wildly differing narratives. It is consistent to the very end, leaving nothing vague or unfinished without intentionality. The House of the Spirits, Portrait in Sepia, and Daughter of Fortune make up Allende’s Involuntary Trilogy. There is no right order to reading these books; chronological falls out of publication order, and publication begins at the end of the del Valle line. All three books are standalone novels that tell their own story, and having only read Portrait in Sepia in addition to this one, fit together like distant family, informing their stories rather than defining them.