Hispanic Saga

...She first fills the house with eccentrics and spiritualists, later with victims and refugees from the counterrevolutionary military coup...

...It is hard to imagine that she can exceed or even equal this one, but for a woman who has conjured up a book as eloquent as The House of the Spirits, anything may be possible...

...This distillation of poetic romanticism and grisly realism pervades Allende's luminous prose, yet never overwhelms it...

...Alba, like her mother Blanca, falls in love with a revolutionary and is drawn into his clandestine life...

...Whether or not this is a political commentary by novelist Allende is not clear: Her canvas is too broad and baroque for simplistic messages...

...A summary of the tortuous plot does not begin to suggest the richness and complexity of this astonishing first novel—already widely acclaimed in Europe—by the niece of Chile's murdered Socialist president Salvador Allende...

...but now we are no longer removed by time and semi-mythical legend...

...When "the Candidate" actually wins the presidency with a plurality (as Salvador Allende had done)—despite the long-standing tradition of elections bought by conservatives like Trueba—the oligarchy, the military, and "foreign gringos" combine to destroy the economy and the new government—and they succeed...

...Clara does not emerge from her silence until nine years later, when she announces she will soon marry Esteban Trueba, who had been Rosa's fiance...

...Allende's cornucopian saga begins with the del Valle family, which produces the ethereal young Clara, who becomes mute after peeking into the kitchen and seeing an autopsy performed on her beautiful sister Rosa, dead from a poisoned brandy intended for their father...

...Pedro Tercero grows up to be a leading revolutionary folk singer, Blanca's life-long lover, and the secret father of Alba—who, we find, is writing this novel from the notebooks that had been kept by altruistic and vaguely revolutionary grandmother Clara...

...Ann Morrissett Davidon (Ann Morrissett Davidon is an essayist, critic, and playwright who has recently been teaching drama, poetry, and science fiction at Villanova University...

...The political maneuvers and upheavals in which their lives become caught, while recognizably taking place in Chile, are similar to those in any country where the rich contend with the awakening poor, tradition is challenged by innovation and social change, power concentrates and corrupts, military forces become new oligarchies working out their own cruel and private vendettas...

...The excruciating scenes of repression and torture that follow are described by Allende in the same vivid, meticulous, objective yet powerfully personal manner that she employs throughout the novel...

...Trueba, a rough, self-made man, becomes as worshipfully enamored of Clara as he had been of Rosa...

...The idiosyncrasies, tantrums, pleasures, and sufferings of the three generations of Truebas are as palpable and comprehensible—or incomprehensible—as those of one's own family...

...He builds for Clara a splendid city mansion—the house of the spirits—which becomes the main setting for the rest of the story except for periods spent in the country at Tres Marias, the old run-down Trueba estate that Esteban restored and now rules with an iron hand and a terrible temper...

...A journalist now living in Venezuela, Isabel Allende has reportedly just completed her second novel...

...These are the events of only yesterday, and we observe them not as remote pieces of history or sanitized news items, but as terrible traumas happening to people we know and with whom we empathize...

...Miguel believes the people can overturn the repressive oligarchs (including Esteban Trueba) only with violence...

...Alba's brother Jaime, a dedicated physician to the poor, thinks change must come electorally, but he is later crushed by the counterrevolution...

...When Alba's fingers are cut off—as Trueba had once done to her father Pedro Tercero—and sent to Trueba by his illegitimate grandson Esteban Garcia (now with the counterrevolutionary military police), we feel not only for Alba, but also for her old curmudgeon grandfather who helped bring on the bloodbath which he now thinks has gone too far...

...Interspersed with Alba's reconstruction of Clara's notebooks "that bore witness to life," and memories encouraged and reinforced by her grandfather in his later, mellower years, are first-person autobiographical ruminations of the old man himself, whose loving bond with Alba withstands all the vicissitudes of his diabolic temperament and their divergent lives...

...With passion and compassion, with wit and imagination about the ambiguous, contradictory lives of real human beings...

...It is there that their little daughter Blanca cavorts innocently with Pedro Ter-cero Garcia, son of the estate's peasant foreman...

...No matter that the Trueba family in Isabel Allende's magnificent novel is a fictitious composite in a nameless country...

...Ten-year-old Clara had foreseen Rosa's death (her clairvoyance is presented as naturally as all other "facts" in this strangely surreal novel), but she is traumatized by "the dreadful spectacle of Rosa lying on her back on the marble slab, a deep gash forming a canal down the front of her body, with her intestines beside her on the salad platter...

...The kind old family doctor seems suddenly transformed into a "dark, fat vampire" like the ones in the books left by their eccentric Uncle Marcos...

...We even, in a way, feel for Esteban Garcia himself, embittered bastard and Alba's torturer, who as a child had seen Trueba's similar act of rage against Pedro Tercero and whose grandmother had long ago been brutally raped by Trueba...