OBOC - Chile

A woman writer from Latin America with the last name of Allende, Isabel Allende was the natural pick for Chile for the obvious reasons.  So it was "The house of the spirits" for me for OBOC - Chile

What struck me about the book was that it refused to get boxed into any category - magical-realism (isn't that an oxymoron!), political novel, feminist literature, historic fiction - it had a bit of everything. Spanning three generations of women - Clara, Blanca and Alba, the wife, daughter and granddaughter respectively of the patriarch Esteban Trueba, "The house of the spirits", chronicles the upheavals in the lives of the women due to geological (earthquakes!), socio-political (Marxism, Dictatorship, Coups!) and inter-personal (the love of their lives - Esteban, Pedro Garcia and Miguel) transformations.

Isabel Allende is the niece of Salvador Allende the President of Chile at the time of the infamous 1973 coup which propelled the dictator Pinochet into office.  When Marxists and Conservatives clash, the only winners were the Generals. Without naming names (The President is just  The President - Allende, the Poet is just the Poet - Pablo Neruda?) , Isabel has beautifully woven this piece of Chile's tumultous history into the story and we get a glimpse of what Chileans went through during those years.

There is no such thing as a middle ground in the entire novel, be it in the events or the characters - maybe that is the reality that Chile faced through its history. Esteban has to be one of the most violent patriarch that i've ever encountered in a novel - his tantrums and dominance were always extreme and so were his passions. Similarly every character you encounter were extreme in their own ways - Clara's complete neglect for anything mundane, Blanca's love for Pedro, Ferula's love for Clara, Pedro and Miguel's commitment to Marxism, Jamie's concern for others, Nicholas' indulgences and so on. Even the events were catastrophic - from the macroscopic ones like the earthquake that rocked Chile, the dictatorship that came into power,  to the microscopic ones - Barrabas' death, Clara's silence, etc. That's what made the novel so gripping and only when I put it down did i realize that there was no middle ground anywhere.

The other major theme is conflict - landlord Vs tenant, Marxist Vs Conservatives, Nature Vs Man, the Patriarch Esteban Vs the Matriarch Clara, the young Vs the Old. All these conflicts ended in a lose-lose situation as the lack of harmony was capitalized the Military Dictatorship.

The third theme I saw in the novel is cyclical interconnectedness of events and characters. Esteban starts off the whole story with his brutal rapes, only to see his dearest granddaughter Alba being raped by a product of his own crime. Clara is the only constant thread that runs through everyone's life and even after her death, Clara is the one that evokes Alba's spirit to live and tell the story which Clara had painstakingly recorded through her notes.

The House of Spirits is a great piece of literature, at times humorous, fantastic, magical, gruesome, it just stirs so many emotions in the reader that it was so hard to put down. Now that I am reading "One Hundred Years of Solitude" for Colombia, I am eager to see why the two books are so often compared.