At her mother’s urging, for example, Allende altered the name of Alba’s father, for the author had unconsciously given the character one of her own father’s surnames.Īlba and Esteban, linked by both familial bonds and by shared narrative roles, establish a set of opposites at the heart of the novel. The resemblance between Allende’s relatives and her fictional characters persists, however. Esteban Trueba, for example, bears little resemblance to Allende’s memories of her grandfather. Indeed, though many of the characters are based on members of Allende’s family, they do not represent the reality of those people. Allende’s writing quickly turned from an epistolary form to imaginative fiction. She has famously stated that The House of the Spirits began as a letter to her grandfather, and the book does encapsulate elements of her own family.
The novel portrays a generational story, a saga, examining not just the history of one family but also the contrasts between a younger and an older generation against a backdrop of political and social turmoil in modern Latin America.Īllende began the book as a retrospective look at her own family. Even so, the book contains sufficient supernatural elements-including the character Clara’s fascination with spirits-to tie it strongly to the genre of magic realism. The House of the Spirits revolves around memories more than spirits. As the first significant novel of its kind authored by a woman, The House of the Spirits has since had a tremendous impact on Latin American literature. Unable to secure a positive response from a Latin American publisher, Allende turned to Plaza y Janés in Spain, and the book was soon translated into French, German, and, in 1985, English. Although the book received tremendous critical acclaim and acknowledgment soon after its publication in Spain as La casa de los espíritus in 1982, the road to publication was difficult.
The first novel by the Chilean writer Isabel Allende (1942– ), The House of the Spirits remains the author’s best-known and most popular work, despite the subsequent success of her following novels, memoirs, and children’s books. Analysis of Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spiritsīy NASRULLAH MAMBROL on February 12, 2023
0 kommentar(er)
