I felt that there was so much heartbreak and tragedy in this story. But I kept thinking about this one It is beautiful. I wish that I could go back and start it all over again. Esteban Trueba Though does he ultimately redeem himself? The book touches on magical realism and it was done perfectly, weaved into the lives of each of the Trueba family members.
Throw in a government political coup. Oh I want to hear more and more about these wonderful characters. I listened to this one via audio. There were two narrators - one male, one female. It took me a bit of time to get into the flow of the narration on this one. But once I did, I was captivated. However, I did not care for the male narration as much, from the point of view of Esteban Trueba.
To me, I had a picture in my mind of Esteban and how he would speak. And this voice narration was just not him. Esteban was rugged, violent, jealous, Just a nit-pick on my end. I just found it too jarring when the narration would switch, taking me out of my dream-like trance that I was in listening to this magical book. A beautiful book that I hope to revisit one day again and savor the details of the wonderful story.
View all 46 comments. Mar 10, Jen rated it it was amazing Shelves: 5-star-favourites , south-america. This took me some time to read as I wanted to savour it for as long as possible and not have it end. This is my first Allende novel which depicts an epic story of a Latin American family that spans 3 generations.
Weaved throughout are hints of mysticism, history, political unrest, cultural richness along with vivid descriptions of a cast of characters in which some evoke ethereal auras and others violent furies.
View all 39 comments. Aug 15, Nayra. Our souls has no place in this world even if we lived in a one thousands room House We continue to run madly behind freedom and love,money and beauty; justice and power; master ship and independence For 75 years, and three families Allende have taken us to run behind the mirage and fall under the disappointments of an old house.
From the grandmother to the late granddaughter they all shared a name meaning: whiteness and disclosure.. Nivia grandmother was an early "feminism" and put them on the path of independence and giving to others and doing good and the compation for others either for Political reasons like Nivea and Alba Or just for the sake of charity like Clara and Blanca Esteban Troubia He's the man who wither plants when he enter the place The angry lion; the self-made the fascist; the disgruntled dictator The descendant of the Peruvian royal family, who in his childhood bloomed with newspaper under his clothes and walked miles because he did not have Santafo to ride the tram..
May 10, Nancy rated it it was ok Shelves: I really wish I could say this is an amazing book, worthy of so much thoughtful praises, etc. I mean, the only thing I like from this entire book is the language: the metaphors, descriptions, the lines that sound so poetic I really wish I could say this is an amazing book, worthy of so much thoughtful praises, etc. I mean, the only thing I like from this entire book is the language: the metaphors, descriptions, the lines that sound so poetic and true, and the impressive vocabulary.
Everything else? Not so much. Absolutely hate how the story shifts like a timeline of generations. That how it looks like to me. Take Pedro Tercero and Blanca, for instance. Love at first sight. Second of all, no development. Love at first sight is pretty explanatory itself, but how the heck did they grow to love each other so much? So what if they do all of that? Of course, if it was just one couple, I could handle. But the sad thing is that the same goes for Clara and Esteban.
And Clara was only in it because of her vision, which makes me more frustrated. If you can see the future, why not change it? For a character that seems pretty strong—yet identified as fragile and beautiful, of all the freaking adjectives to describe women! Isabel Allende tries to make her manner seem so unorganized and magical realism that she comes off rather cold and unconvincing. And the fact that she hardly talks, not just her character and her mute phases but the dialogue in the book itself really, the only one who actually says things throughout the book in conversation form would be Esteban and Transito.
I felt they talked more than husband and wife. Ironic much? I mean, I saw a spark in his relationship with a prostitute rather than Clara, which is just wrong. Still continuing with the storyline, I find the political stuff just plain boring.
How many more discussion topics about this can I handle before I start to scream? It makes the story so predictable because it is. With this topic, it threatens the characters and changes their personalities. Instead of being natural people, they get portrayed as good citizens who want to fight for what they believe in.
Take the Holocaust, for instance. How much people stood up for Jews then? But nope, not the case. It drives me crazy how the author, out of the blue, tells you what can be expected somewhere down the road. Then, the author jumps in with, little did she know that she would have to one day. And it also makes me nuts whenever characters appear and disappear. Like Transito. And finally, she helps him. Oh, just the tiniest thing can frustrate me about this book. The rating: I would have given it 1 star, but the writing was good, so I decided to be nice.
View all 14 comments. Sep 06, Alex rated it it was amazing Shelves: hot-sex , top , , good-dogs. Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez's epic, it follows several cyclic generations of a family through the history of a country. But it has an immediacy that Years, with its frustrating mist, lacks; the story is better.
It's a better book; it's the best book in the magical realism genre I've read. South American literature is different from the rest - no, seriously, it is, I know that's a huge genera Years of Solitude except not boring, is what Isabel Allende's landmark of magical realism is.
South American literature is different from the rest - no, seriously, it is, I know that's a huge generalization and some South American books are just like other books, but when you read the big towering classics from South America they feel different, and the difference is magic.
Also violence, but that's a trait all colonized literature shares. We talk about magical realism a lot; that's a patronizing term meaning that it's just like real literature except with magic. It's patronizing to fantasy books, not to South Americans, although to be fair most fantasy is pretty lame. The magic starts way farther back than that, though, in a metafictional world of dark wizards that's even more compelling for me.
This is the world of the mighty Borges Argentina, s or so , Julio Cortazar Argentina, s , dazzling Clarice Lispector Brazil, s , and the grandfather of it all is sly Machado De Assis Brazil, late s , who once wrote a chapter called "Let us proceed to the chapter. In the meantime we have House of the Spirits Chile, , which is the best magical realist novel ever written, and believe me because I've read, like The story follows three generations of women in the Trueba family: clairvoyant Clara, who marries anger-afflicted Esteban Trueba; their daughter Blanca, who carries on a secret affair with Pedro Terces Garcia, the son of Trueba's foreman; their daughter Alba, another mystic of sorts.
They have a tendency to create fantastic creatures, out of cloth or clay or anything. Other characters include Clara and Esteban's twins Jaime the socialist doctor and Nicolas the guru; Trueba's bastard by rape Esteban Garcia; Pablo Neruda, himself; and one of the best dogs in literature, Barrabas.
There are even more, but you will have no trouble keeping everyone straight, because Allende is a fantastic writer. Along the way Allende tells the story of Chile and its fight for socialism.
All the characters are affected by the turmoil; each is forced to pick a side. This heats up around the three quarter mark, and if you thought the book was engaging before, which you did, you'll be riveted for the last part.
It's tough going - I've already mentioned rape and there's no shortage of it, along with some child molestation and some torture. And, if you're curious, even a hot consensual adult sex scene or three. Again, the other ongoing theme of South American novels is violence, which is always present and gets increasingly horrifying as we go.
The house itself is not the Trueba ranch in the country, Tres Marias, but their house in town that Trueba builds and then is knocked down by an earthquake and then is rebuilt again, and each time is slowly transformed by the Trueba women into a labyrinth, for various reasons - Clara responds to spirits, Alba is hiding political refugees, but it is always described as a labyrinth, which I imagine is a nod to Borges.
And like a labyrinth, the entire intricate structure fits together perfectly in ways you couldn't have imagined. There are twists and turns and sometimes you find yourself in a passage you swear you've been in before, and sometimes you think all is lost, and suddenly you're out, bewildered but exhilarated.
What kind of architect dreamed this thing up? What just happened? Who knows, but it was magic. View all 31 comments. Mar 31, Perry rated it really liked it. Allende', who to my mind should soon be Chile's 3d Nobel Laureate in Literature, wrote the novel based loosely on her own family and nation. The novel's fictional characters and events follow closely the lives and times of Chile, Pinochet and Salvadore Allende, her first cousin once removed , who was Chile's socialist president at the time of the coup d'etat.
Reports conflict over whether he was assassinated or committed suicide shortly after the coup commenced. Salvador Allende , 30th President of Chile, Gen. Augusto Pinochet , Chilean dictator. Isabel Allende's fictional Neruda counterpart likewise died under suspicious circumstances and his funeral is a significant event in the novel, as civilians on both the left and the right were severely shaken by the death, which foreshadowed several more years of a ruthless, murderous military regime.
Allende's prose is both graceful and readily comprehensible, as she chronicles a captivating, concinnous tale chiseled in history and filled with passions inflamed by family, politics and power, love and lust, malevolence and mysticism. Highly recommended. PS: The film version received bad reviews, likely because the novel's scope is too broad to satisfactorily cover in a 2 or 3 hour film. If it doesn't happen, it should. The novel is so fertile not to captivate an audience in another video format, what, with the convergence of South American mysticism, the time the early 70s , the passion of 2 love affairs and the politics communists v.
View all 6 comments. A novel both historical and fantastic, I admit that it left me perplexed and that I started reading this intrigued, not sure of liking. Well, I won over! This mix of genres coupled with Isabel Allende's talents as a storyteller takes us to a South American country Chile is never named from the beginning of the 20th century to the dictatorship.
Many subjects discussed, the characters are very complex; the magic is present without heaviness. An interesting and pleasant reading! Jul 02, BrokenTune rated it it was amazing Shelves: reviewed. Soon Clara was afraid of nothing. She was unmoved by the sudden appearance of the most livid and undernourished monsters in her room, or by the knock of devils and vampires at her bedroom window.
Nana dressed up as a headless pirate, as the executioner of the "Nana had the idea that a good fright might make the child speak, and spent nine years inventing all sorts of desperate strategies for frightening Clara, the end result of which was to immunize the girl forever against terror and surprise. Nana dressed up as a headless pirate, as the executioner of the Tower of London, as a werewolf or a horned devil, depending on her inspiration of the moment and on the ideas she got while flipping through the pages of certain horror magazines, which she bought for this purpose and from which, although she was unable to read, she copied the illustrations.
She had acquired the habit of gliding silently through the hallways and jumping at the child in the dark, howling through the doorways, and hiding live animals between her sheet, but none of this elicited so much as a peep from the little girl. This was my second reading of The House of the Spirits and, if anything, I enjoyed the magical elements of the book much more on this visit.
A re-visit. The patriarch Esteban is a volatile, proud man whose voracious pursuit of political power is tempered only by his love for his delicate wife, Clara, a woman with a mystical connection to the spirit world.
When their daughter Blanca embarks on a forbidden love affair in defiance of her implacable father, the result is an unexpected gift to Esteban: his adored granddaughter Alba, a beautiful and strong-willed child who will lead her family and her country into a revolutionary future.
One of the most important novels of the twentieth century, The House of the Spirits is an enthralling epic that spans decades and lives, weaving the personal and the political into a universal story of love, magic, and fate. General note: First published: Alfred A.
Knopf, General note: Imprint varies. Contributor: Bogin, Magda, translator. Contributor: Translation of: Allende, Isabel. Loading branch holdings Bogin, Magda, translator. Filled with color-saturated illustrations that echo Hundertwasser's bold. An orphan raised in Valparaiso, Chile, by a Victorian spinster and her rigid brother, vivacious young Eliza Sommers follows her lover to California during the Gold Rush of Entering a rough-and-tumble world of new arrivals driven mad by gold fever, Eliza moves in a society of single men and prostitutes.
Completing the trilogy that includes her bestselling novels Daughter of Fortune and The House of the Spirits, Portrait in Sepia is a stunning novel about memory and family secrets Set at the end of the nineteenth century, Portrait in Sepia is a richly imagined historical novel featuring the colorful and. Memoir, autobiography, epicedium, perhaps even some fiction: they are all here, and they are all quite wonderful.
In , as Poland falls under the shadow of the Nazis, young. This sweeping novel from the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Petal of the Sea tells the epic story of Violeta Del Valle, a woman whose life spans one hundred years and bears witness to the greatest upheavals of the twentieth century.
Violeta comes into the world on. Publisher: Atria Books. Kindle Book Release date: October 27, Availability can change throughout the month based on the library's budget. You can still place a hold on the title, and your hold will be automatically filled as soon as the title is available again.
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