The House of the Spirits

“-In almost every family there’s a fool or a crazy person. – Clara assured her while she concetrated in her knitting (…). – You can’t always see them, because they’re kept out of sight as if they were something to be ashamed of. They’re locked up in the back room so visitors won’t see them. But actually there’s nothing to be ashamed of. They’re God’s creatures too.

-But there’s no one like that in our family, Grandmother- Alba replied.

-No, here the madness was divided up equally, and there was nothing left over for us to have our own lunatic”.

Continuing with the series of Female Latin American Writers, today I’ll talk about the first novel of the Chilean writer Isabel Allende, published in Buenos Aires in 1982, tells us the life lessons of the Trueba Family along 4 generations, we see through the eyes of 2 of its members the social transformations of the country, besides the life, death, love and struggles due to different ideoligies among the family

This is a particular book, is the best sense  of the word; in the beginning you think nothing extraordinary is going to happen, but as you follow the story, you realize you want to keep reading, only to know what is going to happen with this special family, which will be the destination of this group of people, that if it weren’t for their blood ties, they wouldn’t have anything in common.

Is amazing to see the narration of the revolution, and what both sides had to suffer once the military forces took the power, it opens up your eyes and makes you realize we’re all in the same boat, in the long run there is not “good side” when everyone ends up losing.

This book was also taken to the big screen in 1993, by the director Billie August, starring Jeremy Irons, Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Winona Ryder and Antonio Banderas, however and with much pain I must say that they changed many things on the story, changing even the experiences of the main characters, so I haven’t seen it.

Score: 4 cushions 

 

Another great work, this one is also classified among the “magical realism” that Gabriel García Marquez mastered, it mixes in a beautiful way the softness of the fantasy with the hard reality of the revolution.