Dearest readers: While I'm at school, here are musings on one of my favorite books, The House of the Spirits.
Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits is a charged novel containing political commentary as well as themes of family, prophecy and spirituality, and love. Spirits is an immensely but not overly complex novel following four generations of a family, beginning with the children of Nivea and Severo del Valle and concluding with the pregnancy of their great-granddaughter Blanca. The many themes in the book all have an overarching circular feeling, following a natural cycle of life or karma. This is acknowledged in the closing of the book, as our narrator is revealed to be Alba, compiling her family’s story through meticulous journals of her grandmother Clara. Alba, at least a generation removed from many of the beginnings of the events influencing the course of her family history, is able to make many connections between the actions of her grandfather and things that happened to her. She lets go of the desire for vengeance after recognizing the outcomes of many previous instances of revenge, and how these generations-old dynamics manifested toxicity affecting even her generation. The recurring themes of family and romantic love, political divides, and foresight give Spirits a broader sense of natural cycles. This, combined with Allende’s use of magical realism, ties the themes together by mirroring the dynamic of the interconnected family, using the overlying feeling of community to connect the underlying story with her commentary.
The large family of Spirits, beginning with the del Valle parents and grandparents and going down to Blanca, is full of multilayer, constantly shifting relationships. We meet Nivea's mother Nana, who outlives her daughter and son-in-law; Nivea’s daughters Rosa the beautiful and Clara; Clara’s husband Esteban Trueba; and their daughter Blanca and twin boys, Nicolás and Jaime. Both Jaime and Nicolás experience tremendous crushes on Amanda, and later Blanca’s daughter Alba falls in love with Amanda’s little brother Miguel. Esteban Trueba, the main patriarch, is portrayed in a harsh light through much of the story, although there are first-person paragraphs from his perspective interspersed with the mainly close-third-person narrative. Various members of the family clash on every imaginable issue; Esteban is very conservative politically and socially, while Blanca, Miguel, and Alba especially are much more liberal. Clara is very passive for much of the story, preferring to spend her time in the spirit world and remains completely oblivious to many of the events in her family. She predicts many of the significant events in the family history, as well as earthquakes, accidents, and other natural disasters. Both Blanca and Alba are rebellious in their youth, willing to sacrifice their relationships with their family for their lovers. Nicolás and Jaime’s relationship varies over the course of the story, due to their at times conflicting personalities and the incompatibility of their love for the same woman.
The romantic relationships of Spirits are often tangled with those of the other characters. When Esteban Trueba enters the story, it is as the owner of a coal mine, writing letters to his faraway fianceé Rosa the beautiful, whose character is never fully developed. Esteban is full of loneliness for Rosa, who he cannot fully communicate with from a distance, and who he’s barely seen in person. He puts all his energy into working so he’ll be able to marry her. Soon, Clara foresees Rosa’s accidental death, and although her prophecy isn’t taken seriously by her family, Rosa dies soon after from poison meant for her father. Esteban Trueba is overwhelmed by his anger at the loss of his beautiful bride, who he never had a chance to build a life with. When Clara breaks a period of silence to announce that she’s about to be married, her family focuses on her speech and completely forgets her words, so everyone except Clara is taken by surprise when Esteban comes to ask for her hand in marriage. “‘I'm going to be married soon,’ she said. ‘To whom?’ Severo asked. ‘To Rosa's fiance,’ Clara replied. Only then did they realize she had spoken for the first time in all those years” (99). Later in the story we read the long romance between Blanca (Clara’s daughter) and Pedro Garcia, which lasts from childhood until the end of the book, with few interruptions. Their relationship is complicated by Esteban’s hatred of Pedro, as well as Esteban’s bastard son, taught by his unacknowledging father also to hate the couple’s union. The circular complexity in Spirits influences the romances of its characters, creating a web of relationships influenced by innumerable lives.
The characters’ relationships are crafted with slightly more complexity than is realistic. Esteban Trueba’s sporadic but lifelong relationship with Transito Soto, a prostitute and businesswoman, begins shortly after Rosa’s death when Esteban visits the brothel where Transito works. She tells him about her dreams for her future, and he agrees to lend her fifty pesos, which can buy her “everything [she] need[s] to start” (69). She agrees to pay him back someday, “with interest” (69). The next few times they meet, years later, Transito has significantly improved her position in life; she offers to repay the money, but he refuses, preferring instead to have a favor owed to him. When Alba becomes involved in Miguel’s political activism and is captured by Esteban’s illegitimate son, Esteban discovers that Transito has an influential enough position that she has connections in the government. Transito agrees to help Alba to freedom, repaying Esteban’s years-old kindness. While this and other constantly evolving relationships in Spirits are somewhat implausible upon close scrutiny, they fit well with Clara’s otherworldly sense of life. After Clara dies, she returns to her family’s home to offer support and communication through their period of grief and her presence remains in the story through the end of the book. The numerous instances of reconnecting with acquaintances years after a first meeting, the presence of so many circles of events, and Clara’s foresight and prophecies add to the sense of spirituality and magical realism in the book.
The interconnected events, characters, and themes in Spirits are connected throughout the story with limitless layers of complexity. Many of these are tied together at the end of the book, as Alba is writing a narrative of her family’s history, illuminated with her open-minded consciousness of events in her world, and willingness to break out of patterns set by previous generations. Alba is taken prisoner after a tangled political revolution, in which her boyfriend Miguel--the younger brother of her uncles’ Amanda--is involved. Esteban Trueba and his illegitimate son Esteban Garcia, born after he raped a young peasant woman early in the story, are both on the other political side than Miguel and Alba; after Esteban Garcia discovers that his organization is holding Alba captive, he completes the cycle his father began by abusing Alba. There are many instances of long term or multi-generational cycles; debts incurred to a father are paid to his granddaughter, and money lent to a young woman is paid back in kindness at the end of her life. All of the themes of Spirits follow the same circular pattern of eventual repayment, for both positive or negative events, days or decades later.
The women in the family of Spirits have very distinct personalities, roles, and experiences. While they’re part of a close, connected family, Nivea, Alba, Clara and Blanca remain distinct characters with little resemblance. Their names, however, are closely related: Blanca translates to white, Clara to clear, Nivea to snowy, and Alba to dawn. This is addressed in the story by Blanca, when Alba is born; trying to carry on the pattern of names, she wants to name her daughter after Clara, but is convinced that it’s better to give her daughter a synonymous name than reuse Clara’s. The emotional closeness of the four generations of women to each other is reflected by their names, but not overdone with similar personalities or lives. All four have incredibly different relationships with their mothers and daughters as well as other important figures in each of their lives, and each reacts in her own way to changes experienced in the story of Spirits. The importance of Clara’s clairvoyance, which largely shapes the course of the book, and the relationships between mother and daughter are reflected in Allende’s choice of names for her female characters.
Let me know your thoughts on essay-posting, The House of the Spirits, magical realism, and other books you'd like to see reviewed in the future!
Happy reading!
M. Gabrielle
M. Gabrielle
