The House of the Spirits

"Isabel Allende is a very successful novelist and one of the great storytellers of the world. The House of the Spirits was her first book. It made her world famous and, still today, I think it’s fundamental to read for anyone who wants to understand Chile and Chilean society. Because even though it’s a novel, it spans several generations of a Chilean family, and so you get a fictionalized version of the history of Chile through their story. Their quirks and foibles as individuals, as humans, are typical of Chilean society even today. So if you read this novel, you have a good foundation in the strangeness or the unique character of Chilean society. For example, travellers to Chile will agree that it is almost impossible to get a Chilean to tell you what they’re really thinking. If you’re driving around and ask for directions, rather than tell you that they have no idea, they’ll give you a long, involved story. It’s the cultural impossibility of saying, ‘I don’t know.’ If you understand this idiosyncratic behaviour, you can relax and just ask someone else for directions. If you ask five people, you’ll get five different answers, but the mystery of that is easier to bear if you’re expecting it. Yes, and other things. For example, the matriarch doesn’t like to name problems, because then they become real. That sounds like a bizarre thing to do, but similarly, if you ask someone, ‘Is a trek up that mountain a good idea?’ a classic response would be, ‘Oh, that’s complicated.’ Complicated means it’s a really bad idea and not possible. Those subtleties of interaction are all in this novel. So apart from the fact that The House of the Spirits is a great story and a great read, if you pay attention, you really do learn a lot about how Chilean society works. It also covers the dictatorship and the betrayals that occurred at that time. And it gives you a really strong sense of the role of women in society in Chile—how strong they need to be to survive. Chile is a country of strong women and that is also key to the novel. The Allende name is famous in Chile. Isabel Allende herself was in danger and had to leave and go and live in Venezuela for eight years and she now lives in the United States. But it doesn’t really make a difference to the novel, no. The truth is, I never meant to write the book. After a long time in this country, and my sons grown up, I was actually thinking of going back to England and doing something else. But then we had an uprising in 2019, immediately followed by the COVID pandemic. So I was trapped: I couldn’t leave Chile. I was stuck all alone in my house, and I needed to do something constructive to not go mad. Many of the stories I had in my head for years, but I hadn’t intended to write them down. But because of the strange circumstances, I sat down and I wrote them. I really enjoyed fleshing out stories that I vaguely knew about: like the story of Javiera Carrera, the independence activist, and the role of women in society. I looked much closer at key events since I have lived here, like the 2010 earthquake, and shared some of the unique travel experiences my sons and I have had, like climbing a volcano, kayaking in Patagonia, or discovering the Atacama Desert in bloom after rare rains. It’s not a book about me. I wanted to write a portrait of Chile, and I wanted to write stories that would illustrate different aspects of the country. I also wanted it to be fun to read. So each chapter is a story on its own. It could be history, it could be music, it could be art, but each is based on a combination of my own experiences and many years of research. Of course, there is also a little bit about why we ended up in our particular Chilean valley, but my main intention was to paint a picture of the country as a whole, warts and all, the good bits, the bad bits, the joy and the sorrow. Yes, it’s unique because Chile is about 4000 miles long, but it’s rarely more than 120 miles wide. So there are places—and specifically at the end of my valley, there’s a mountain called La Campana—where, on a clear day, you can see both the Andes the Pacific Ocean at the same time, which is just amazing. You can see mountains in Argentina, because the Andean mountains are the border with Argentina. It’s an extraordinary sight. In fact, Charles Darwin wrote about it. He came here and climbed that same mountain. So that’s a fun thought as well. Again, it was sheer chance. When we arrived in Santiago, we knew we wouldn’t live there because it’s very polluted, and my younger son had asthma. So we travelled north, we travelled south, we went on excursions. One excursion led us inland from Valparaiso, because there’s a metro train. It’s a winegrowing region. We went to the end of the line, and then we carried on. We just found ourselves in this lovely valley, with a national park at the end of it. The quality of life is just fantastic. And we found a great school. So it sort of snowballed from there."

"The House of the Spirits is a modern-day classic, and a staple of Latin American literature. Personally, I have read this novel at least three times, and it’s one of those books that I can close my eyes and picture scene by scene. I don’t think I would be the writer I am today without it. The book is seen through two points of view, Esteban who is the patriarch of the Trueba family, and his granddaughter Alba, and spans four generations through the political upheavals of Chile, which is Allende’s home country. I would argue that it is all reality. Magic, mysticism, myths, ghost stories, superstitions, spirituality, religion, miracles, curses, the occult… They are part and parcel of growing up in Latin America. Magical realism is simply our reflection of the mundane, our way of dealing with ongoing extraordinary, surreal events; military coups, femicide, collapsing economies, hundreds of thousands of people killed in an endless war on drugs. Magical realism is a mirror to our daily experiences, and I think Allende leans into this facet of our world in a very natural way."