The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende is a novel which spans four generations of the Del Valle family, starting from Nivea, to Clara, to Blanca and Alba. Taking us through momentous events in the history of the world and the country at the turn of the 20th century and afterwards, the novel chronicles the life and times of the Delvalle and Treuba families, in their abodes of abundance and richness, of splendor and largesse, of miracle and misery, of love and magic, all brewn inside the Houses of Spirits. The novel is an affectionate tale about families. At one level the chronicle is a documentation. Yet it is a subtle grasping of the mythical and magical that often goes unnoticed in Life’s humdrum existence. Clara and Alba are two kindred souls who are able to sense the weightiness of the moment, clasp the electrifying visions of life that get submerged in a spiral of hate and violence.
“Barrabas came to us by sea” The novel opens with these lines and apparently, denoting the cyclical nature of memory, ends with the same lines. Recounting the history of four generations of a family is unlike the task of a historian for a novelist. Isabel Allende is fully in grasp of the absurdity and lunacy of this House of Spirits, where a severed head is preserved over a few generations without burial to avoid a scandal, a favorite pet dog is skinned and stuffed into a carpet to give eternal company, an eccentric Uncle vanishes into the sky after a public demonstration of his newest invention. Such a tale is possible only if one can sense the bewildering array of incidents that life is. The magical has always existed. Marquez’s ‘ 100 years of Solitude’ wondrously demonstrates this. An elevated perception and the unshackling of the fetters of reason, cause and logic will enable this sensibility. On the lines of Marquez’s novel, The House of the Spirits celebrates life; the irrationality, the cruelty, the barbarity and the lucidity amidst an apparent chaos. Esteban Treuba is the patriarch who lives through 4 generations. The two Delvalle sisters, Rosa the beautiful and Clara the clairvoyant are his loves. His life is a journey from pride, arrogance, selfishness and rancor to remorse, compassion and love. The novel seems to say that Life makes everything possible. The aura of the Latin American with the presence of war, dictators, military torture and abductions places the novel in a familiar context as in The Death of Artemio Cruz, The Autumn of the Patriarch or the The Feast of the Goat. Isabel Allende’s comprehension and understanding of life as not only isolated family histories but also as a throbbing tumult in the progress of a Nation where individual destinies are shaping the Nation, gives this novel an epic scope. One does see this, as the novel travels from the pastoral to the industrial, from the feudal to the democratic. It is surely there in the class of ‘The General in his Labyrinth or Love in the Time of Cholera.