Guide to magical realism

Reading lists

A guide to magical realism

Eva Luna

A heartfelt novel, powerful enough to make a dictator cry

She can spin a tale out of a pebble and a piece of string ... the atmosphere of encroaching doom, buried treasure and broken hearts is never tragic because there is a continual sense of life's endless opulence

Packed with action, prodigal in invention, vivid in description and metaphor, this cleverly plotted novel is enhanced by its flowing prose and absolute assurance

Allende's world is both sweet and sinister, and the flamboyance and power of her vision can seduce the sourest and most literal-minded reader

Isabel Allende was born in Lima, Peru, in 1942 and moved to Chile as a child. She was a journalist for many years before publishing her first novel, The House of the Spirits¸ in 1982. She is the author of eight novels, including Inés of My Soul, Daughter of Fortune, and Portrait in Sepia. She has also written a collection of stories, four memoirs, and a trilogy of children's novels. Her books have been translated into more than twenty-seven languages and have become bestsellers across four continents. In 2004 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Isabel Allende lives in California.

'My name is Eva, which means "life", according to a book of names my mother consulted. I was born in the back room of a shadowy house, and grew up amidst ancient furniture, books in Latin, and human mummies, but none of those things made me melancholy, because I came into the world with a breath of the jungle in my memory.' 
 
Isabel Allende tells the sweet and sinister story of an orphan who beguiles the world with her astonishing visions, triumphing over the worst of adversity and bringing light to a dark place.

The House Of The Spirits

A best seller and critical success in Europe and Latin America, The House of the Spirits is the magnificent epic of the Trueba family - their loves, their ambitions, their spiritual quests, their relations with one another, and their participation in the history of their times, a history that becomes destiny and overtakes them all.

The amazing Isabel Allende, the niece of Chile's ousted President Salvador Allende, is creating the kind of literary sensation most writers only dream of. And "The House of the Spirits" is no ordinary first novel. It is an exotic vision - a brilliant, impassioned epic - and a personal coup for the young journalist who "had to write it." 
 
The book seemed to come from nowhere: a first novel by a forty two-year-old Chilean journalist that has dazzled readers throughout Europe and Latin America, making its author the most unexpected sensation since the emergence of Gabriel Garcia Márquez.

An extraordinary debut, The House of the Spirits marks the appearance of a major international writer. 
Rarely has a first novel catapulted a writer so suddenly to international attention and acclaim as The House of the Spirits. The author, Isabel Allende, is niece of former Chilean president, Salvador Allende Gossens; yet she was totally unknown to the world at large until the events of last year.

With this spectacular first novel, Isabel Allende becomes the first woman to join what has heretofore been an exclusive male club of Latin American novelists. 
"The House of the Spirits" draws on this experience, though always in veiled terms. A meticulously detailed family saga spanning four generations, the novel is set in a mythified land of volcanoes, earthquakes and hurricanes, peopled by characters who seem to derive their extravagance from their natural surroundings.

We begin - at the turn of the century, in an unnamed South American country - in the childhood home of the woman who will be the mother and grandmother of the clan, Clara del Valle. A warm-hearted, hypersensitive girl, Clara has distinguished herself from an early age with her telepathic abilities - she can read fortunes, make objects move as if they had lives of their own, and predict the future. Following the mysterious death of her sister, the fabled Rosa the Beautiful, Clara has been mute for nine years, resisting all attempts to make her speak. When she breaks her silence, it is to announce that she will be married soon. 
Her husband-to-be is Esteban Trueba, a stern, willful man, given to fits of rage and haunted by a profound loneliness. At the age of thirty-five, he has returned to the capital from his country estate to visit his dying mother and to find a wife. (He was Rosa's fiancé, and her death has marked him as deeply as it has Clara.) This is the man Clara has foreseen - has summoned - to be her husband; Esteban, in turn, will conceive a passion for Clara that will last the rest of his long and rancorous life. 
We go with this couple as they move into the extravagant house he builds for her, a structure that everyone calls "the big house on the corner," which is soon populated with Clara's spiritualist friends, the artists she sponsors, the charity cases she takes an interest in, with Esteban's political cronies, and, above all, with the Trueba children: Blanca, a practical, self-effacing girl who will, to the fury of her father, form a lifelong liaison with the son of his foreman, and the twins, Jaime and Nicolás, the former a solitary, taciturn boy who becomes a doctor to the poor and unfortunate; the latter a playboy, a dabbler in Eastern religions and mystical disciplines and, in the third generation, the child Alba, Blanca's daughter (the family does not recognize the real father for years, so great is Esteban's anger), a child who is fondled and indulged and instructed by them all. 
For all their good fortune, their natural (and supernatural) talents, and their powerful attachments to one another, the inhabitants of "the big house on the corner" are not immune to the larger forces of the world. And, as the twentieth century beats on, as Esteban becomes more strident in his opposition to Communism, as Jaime becomes the friend and confidant of the Socialist leader known as the Candidate, as Alba falls in love with a student radical, the Truebas become actors - and victims - in a tragic series of events that gives The House of the Spirits a deeper resonance and meaning.

Isabel Allende

As a girl, Clara del Valle can read fortunes, make objects move as if they had lives of their own, and predict the future. 
 
Following the mysterious death of her sister, Rosa the Beautiful, Clara is mute for nine years. When she breaks her silence, it is to announce that she will be married soon to the stern and volatile landowner Esteban Trueba. 
 
Set in an unnamed Latin American country over three generations, The House of the Spirits is a magnificent epic of a proud and passionate family, secret loves and violent revolution. 
 
'Extraordinary... Powerful... Sharply observant, witty and eloquent' New York Times 
 
'Intensely moving. Both entertaining and deeply serious' Evening Standard 
 
'The only cause The House of the Spirits embraces is that of humanity, and it does so with such passion, humor, and wisdom that in the end it transcends politics&hellip;The result is a novel of force and charm, spaciousness and vigor' Washington Post

Isabel Allende

Books by Isabel Allende

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A guide to magical realism

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