The House of the Spirits in The Roundtable

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Dec 18, 2021 Henk rated it liked it · review of another edition

Moving from meandering rich people problems, family conflicts and people that just don’t change, to three absolutely brutal final chapters set during the rise to dictatorship in Chile
You always think it will happen somewhere else, till it happens here

If The House of the Spirits would have been completely focused on the events of 1973 this would have been a definite 4 star book for me. The first 2/3 of the book felt like boring rich people problems with a pinch of magic: the main character was co Moving from meandering rich people problems, family conflicts and people that just don’t change, to three absolutely brutal final chapters set during the rise to dictatorship in Chile
You always think it will happen somewhere else, till it happens here

If The House of the Spirits would have been completely focused on the events of 1973 this would have been a definite 4 star book for me. The first 2/3 of the book felt like boring rich people problems with a pinch of magic: the main character was completely unclear for me, as was the world in general. We have unnatural beautiful people, with green hair, oracles and enormous poverty and wealth disparities. Initially the book feels like a pastiche on the writing style of One Hundred Years of Solitude, but soon it becomes clear that the magical powers of the characters are no more than interesting asides to the personal conflicts.

Paternalistic (and in general patriarchy oriented) society, including rape and needing to earn before the possibility of marrying form an important part, which gave me quite a surprise when I found out that large part of the book was actually set in the WW2 period. Strangely enough while reading I was reminded of Capital and Ideology of Thomas Piketty who has as one of his thesis the marriage of the educated left and the merchant right comes to mind. This alliance is very clear in The House of the Spirits, with violence and conflict reverberating through time and generations.

The personalities of the colorful family around Clara, Blanca and Alba seem fixed in terms of character, and they don’t seem to (be able to) learn from anything that happen to them. This might be surprisingly realistic but is also very dull in a sense. Everyone is described in long, winding passages, and turn out to be rather crazy in one way or another. And there is a lot of foreshadowing going on.

Around the final 1/3 of the book more dark themes take a prominent role. There is implied child incest with a nephew, abortions, and then the postwar political upheaval leading to the dictatorship.
The doomed love galore is traded in into for book burnings, torture, concentration camps, amputation and rape. All the Esteban monologues were in my view quite annoying, except for the last heartbreaking one, showing Isabel Allende to be quite a competent writer.

The more recent The Twilight Zone of Nona Fernández also covers the same topic, but then the fall of the dictatorship instead of the rise. In general the writing reminded me both of Carlos Ruiz Zafón and the historic parts of Everything Is Illuminated from Jonathan Safran Foer. An interesting read with more depth than I imagined when I was halfway into the book; it's not often I am so surprised by the direction a book takes. ...more

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Nov 09, 2019 Joe rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

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