"The House of the Spirits," by Isabel Allende (Session 2)

🏠 This month we follow the internationally-acclaimed generational saga of a 20th-Century Chilean(?) family, with all its ups and downs, loves and tragedies, machinations and legacies. This is Allende's award-winning debut novel and immediately cemented her authorial status on a global level. The novel's plot is bound with magical realism tinged with a hint of Gothic flavoring. It's a novel that, as one reviewer noted, "seems to have it all." Will you think so? 🏠

If you enjoy this selection, it's part of a trilogy... one that requires slight elaboration. Chronologically the third installment, THoS was the first one published. Readers almost universally recommend reading this one first, though each book simultaneously maintains standalone status and can be read in any order without confusion.

Publishing Date: 1982
Number of Pages: 448 pages, Dial Press Trade Paperback
Author Nationality: Chilean
Translation: from Spanish, by Magda Bogin

Remember, please pick only one of today's two sessions. Thank you! Your Zoom invitation will be emailed to you closer to the meeting date.

From Goodreads:

In one of the most important and beloved Latin American works of the twentieth century, Isabel Allende weaves a luminous tapestry of three generations of the Trueba family, revealing both triumphs and tragedies. Here is patriarch Esteban, whose wild desires and political machinations are tempered only by his love for his ethereal wife, Clara, a woman touched by an otherworldly hand. Their daughter, Blanca, whose forbidden love for a man Esteban has deemed unworthy infuriates her father, yet will produce his greatest joy: his granddaughter Alba, a beautiful, ambitious girl who will lead the family and their country into a revolutionary future.

The House of the Spirits is an enthralling saga that spans decades and lives, twining the personal and the political into an epic novel of love, magic, and fate.