On January 8, 1981, journalist and former television host Isabel Allende, a Chilean political exile, sat down in Venezuela to write a letter to her nearly 100-year-old grandfather in an attempt to bridge the distance between her present and her family’s past. She began with an anecdote he had told her when she was a child, about his fiancée, Rosa, who’d been mistakenly poisoned. As she wrote, she has explained elsewhere, “other characters stepped in,” and the unsent letter grew into the manuscript of her first novel, The House of the Spirits, in which vibrant strands of magic realism heighten the color of a sweeping tapestry of romance, betrayal, revenge, social upheaval, and reconciliation.
Reading this book was my introduction to the concept of magical realism as it lived in the realms of the unlikely and fantastical! The mundane pedantic pace of the characters was a dramatic contrast to the world of spirits and invited me to think beyond the ordinary and to imagine other worlds!
I read this after having lived in Chile, fully immersing myself into their rich and welcoming culture. Years later I read, and loved, this first book by Allende.
I liked this. book about the saga of the Allende family being overthrown in Chile's govt and the turbulent history. The world of spirits really made me think of imaginary worlds.
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