The House Of The Spirits

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He opposes the feminist stances of his wife and daughter, becoming ever more conservative and ornery as he grows older. This is a book that I have re-read on numerous occasions, and I find myself constantly surprised by the strength of my reaction to it.

He rapes many of the peasant women and children, and his first victim, then 15 year old Pancha García, becomes the mother of his bastard son, Esteban García. He becomes friends with the Candidate whilst under the impression that the revolution is to be peaceful. Although the film won several awards in Europe, including Best Film at the Lola Awards from the German Film Academy and the Robert Award from the Danish Film Academy, in America it was regarded as a critical and commercial failure.

A blessing with a work as multi-layered as 'The House of the Spirits', where dissecting it truly helped to grapple with the purpose and principles behind Allende's writing.

But it is not political in the sense of affiliation, promoting a choice between socialism and liberalism. Isabel fled Chile with her family and her writing has undergone changes since, depending on where she is on her life journey. The novel introduces a number of parallel story lines, diverging most notably after the birth of Esteban and Clara’s three children – their daughter Blanca and twin sons Jaime and Nicolas.Fearing a Communist dictatorship, Esteban Trueba and his fellow politicians plan a military coup of the socialist government. When she breaks her silence, it is to announce that she will be married soon to the stern and volatile landowner Esteban Trueba. As the granddaughter of Salvador Allende (the socialist president of Chile deposed by the military coup depicted in the plot), Isabel Allende has written ‘The House of the Spirits’ as a fundamentally political novel. Instead of scrolling through your social media news feed, this is a much better way to spend your spare time in my opinion. In this respect, it reminds me of A Thousand Splendid Suns, which portrays Afghanistan's lurching transition from monarchy to Soviet communism to Taliban totalitarianism through the experiences of one woman and her family.