He returns to marry Rosa’s younger sister, the clairvoyant Clara (Spanish for “clear”), and the two enter a long and ultimately stormy marriage, begetting three children and one grandchild who will become central in the book’s rapid-fire conclusion during the overthrow of the democratically elected government of The Candidate. When that girl, the beautiful Rosa, dies suddenly, Trueba heads to his family’s property in a remote section of the country and builds a modern-day plantation, sublimating his grief into work. The central thread in the story is the Trueba family, introduced after what amounts to a lengthy prologue on the daughter of a prominent local family who is betrothed to Esteban Trueba. (The book also appears in the “second 100” list of honorable mentions in the Novel 100.) While it lacks the broad scope and dreamlike qualities of the genre’s paragon, One Hundred Years of Solitude, it is still an epic combining romance, the rise and fall of a great family, and the turbulent political history of the never-named country of Chile. The House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende, is one of the great works in the magical realism movement prominent in post-colonial literature, especially that of Latin America.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |