The preceding constitutes the first
and the last line of this monumental novel.
Barrabás is a bizarre, gigantic, black dog who was found nearly dead
among the possessions of Clara del Valle’s Uncle Marcos. The little girl immediately adopted and named
him, and he becomes the glue that holds the book together. He never stops growing, it seems, and becomes
as big as a colt. On Clara’s wedding
day, the cook stabs him to death with a kitchen knife. He drags himself into the wedding celebration
and dies with his head in Clara’s lap, staining her wedding dress with his
blood (prefiguring horrors to come, perhaps?)
Afterwards, Esteban Trueba, Clara’s new husband, has the pelt tanned and
turned into a rug, complete with head and glass eyes. Finding this construction laid down in the
nuptial chamber, Clara is horrified and consigns the grotesque gift to the
cellar, where years later her daughter and granddaughter play on the rug and
make love there. At the end of the book,
the aged Esteban and his granddaughter Alba bring up the rug and place it where
it belongs, in the bedroom of Clara, thus completing the union and
reconciliation of past, present, and future.
I’ve summarized this to emphasize
the truly fantastic nature of this book, coupled with its objective brutality. When I set out to discuss a book that is as
famous as this one, I never read any reviews or critiques beforehand – I want
the assessment to proceed from my own impressions. And this book was not what I was expecting;
it’s my first foray into magical realism and I was anticipating a whimsical
tale, charming and perhaps a bit sentimental.
Instead, I found a book that is massive,
brutal, coarse, direct, and totally without sentimentality. I have never read a less sentimental
book. Everything, even the most painful
events, is presented in a detached style, as if seen from a distance. There was not one moment when I was moved to
weep for a character, even when the most dreadful things were happening to
them.
It’s the story of three women –
Clara, Blanca, and Alba – mother, daughter, and granddaughter. It’s surely no coincidence that the three
names mean “clear,” “white,” and “white.”
It’s also the story of Esteban Trueba, who fell in love with Rosa the
Beautiful, Clara’s older sister. Rosa,
who has the green hair of a mermaid (Alba inherits the trait), dies when she
ingests the poison meant for her father, a neophyte politician. Later Esteban marries Clara, but he is hardly
an ideal man or an ideal husband. He is
a landholder – a patrón – but he fails
to grasp the fact that the peasants on his land are human beings. He rapes every girl as she comes into
puberty, and the offspring of the first of these comes back to almost destroy
him and the only thing he loves in his later years. Furthermore, his temper is as volatile as the
volcanoes in the cordillera. When his
daughter gets pregnant by one of these peasants, he whips her, then sets out to
kill her lover, in one of the most memorable scenes in the book. And when he discusses Blanca’s pregnancy with
his wife, she says to him:
“Pedro Tercero Garcia hasn’t done a
thing you haven’t done yourself. You
also slept with unmarried women not of your own class. The only difference is that he did it for
love. And so did Blanca.”
At that, he hits Clara in the face
and knocks her teeth out. After that,
although she continues to live in the same house with her husband, she never
speaks a word to him again.
Beneath the personal stories of the
main characters runs the political situation in Chile. The story spans a period from early in the
20th century through the 1970s coup that killed Marxist President Salvador
Allende and its aftermath of repression under the military and Pinochet. In fact, however, these actual historical characters
are not mentioned by name; Allende is simply “the President” and Pablo Neruda is
referred to only as “the Poet.” Furthermore, the name “Chile” is never
uttered, or the name of any city in the country. At one point the country is referred to as
“this half-forgotten country at the end of the earth.” All this adds to the fantasy feeling; this
could indeed be a constructed world – an imaginary country devised by a fantasy
author – a strip of land between impassable mountains and a vast sea, which
stands alone and is unconnected to reality.
People may leave and go to other countries, which are indeed named, but
whatever and whoever remain in this fantasy world is not governed by the same
laws as the rest of the Earth. Sometimes
in a fantasy world, the fantastic things that happen illustrate reality better
than reality illustrates reality.
The paranormal powers of the women
is one aspect of fantasy in the book.
Clara in particular is not only clairvoyant – she also has powers of
levitation and she can summon spirits, and after her death she remains a
presence in the house, appearing frequently to members of her family. Esteban Trueba’s sister Férula is the most
tragic of the characters; she sacrificed her youth to take care of their
disabled mother, and after the mother’s death, she comes to live with her
brother and Clara and help run the household.
She falls in lesbian love with Clara, which rouses Esteban’s
jealousy. He throws Férula out of the
house, whereupon she curses Esteban (a curse that comes only too true). One day she enters the house, approaches the
family at the dining table, and kisses Clara.
When she leaves, Clara announces, “Férula has died.” They discover later that she died in poverty
and dementia, having refused to spend the money her brother has supplied to
her. Indeed, Esteban Trueba’s principal
attitude to the women in his life is that as long as he supports them
monetarily, it doesn’t matter how he treats them. Later, he comes to realize that this attitude
isn’t enough, but by then it’s too late.
Another aspect of fantasy is the
theme of the prevalence of monsters in that world. It all starts with Barrabás – that hulking
dog of unknown breed. One can’t imagine
Barrabás as a fluffy little lap dog. Blanca
(who becomes a potter) makes Christmas crèches that include monster
animals. And the land itself is a
monster, ready to consume its parasitic population at any time through the
action of earthquake and tidal wave.
I have to say, one of my favorite
fantasy passages is the way the old peasant Pedro Garcia rids the land of a
plague of army ants, after the experts have failed in every attempt to destroy
them. He does it by talking to
them. “Tell them to go, that they are a
nuisance here. They understand.”
I noted two stylistic elements
utilized in the book. The first is foreshadowing. Here is only one of many possible examples: (Re
Blanca’s first meeting with Pedro Tercero when they are both small children): “When
they found them, the little boy was on his back on the floor and Blanca was
curled up with her head on the belly of her new friend. Many years later, they would be found in the
same position, and a whole lifetime would not be long enough for their
atonement.”
The other stylistic element is the use
of long descriptive lists, which add to the richness of the world being
presented. Indeed, the book includes wonderful
descriptive passages, some delicate, some brutal. It’s difficult to choose examples from so
many, so I’ll supply only three – one delicate, one grotesque, one horrific.
The first describes the
fourteen-year-old Blanca (daughter of Esteban and Clara) as she is becoming a
woman.
“She took off her nightgown and,
for the first time in her life looked at her body in detail, and as she did so,
she realized that it was because of all these changes that her friend had run
away. She smiled a new, delicate smile,
the smile of a woman. She put on her old
clothes from the preceding summer, which were almost too small, wrapped herself
in a shawl, and tiptoed out so as not wake the rest of the family. Outside, the fields were shaking off their
sleep and the first rays of sunlight were cutting the peaks of the cordillera like the thrusts of a saber,
warming up the earth and evaporating the dew into a fine white foam that
blurred the edges of things and turned the landscape into an enchanted
dream. Blanca set off in the direction
of the river. Everything was still quiet. Her footsteps crushed the fallen leaves and
the dry branches, producing a light crunching sound, the only noise in that
vast sleeping space. She felt that the
shaggy meadows, the golden wheatfields, and the far-off purple mountains
disappearing in the clear morning sky were part of some ancient memory,
something she had seen before exactly like this, as if she had already lived
this moment in some previous life. The
delicate rain of the night had soaked the earth and trees, and her clothing felt
slightly damp, her shoes cold. She
inhaled the perfume of the drenched earth, the rotten leaves, and the humus,
which awakened an unknown pleasure in all her senses.”
Blanca is forced to marry a certain
man to cover her illegitimate pregnancy, and this man traffics in Indian
artifacts.
“The only thing that truly
distressed her were the mummies. … Inside its jar, shrunken into a fetal
position, wrapped in tatters, and accompanied by its wretched necklaces of
teeth and a handful of rag dolls, the mummy looked like the pit of some exotic
fruit.”
And finally, this speaks for
itself:
“The child Esteban Garcia was by my
side, staring at me silently. He had
picked up the sliced-off fingers and was holding them like a bouquet of bloody
asparagus.”
This leads me to talk about the
point of view. This book is a prime
example of alternating points of view. Mostly
it’s omnipotent third person narration, but occasionally an “I” crops up, and it
isn’t always clear who is speaking. In
the very first paragraph of the book, we have this, speaking of Clara’s
diaries: “She also recorded trivialities, never suspecting that fifty years
later I would use her notebooks to reclaim the past and overcome terrors of my
own [foreshadowing again.]” We don’t
learn who this “I” is – who is writing the book – until the
epilogue. But there are also lengthy passages
in the first person and this is always the voice of Esteban Trueba, as in the
asparagus allusion above. In the
epilogue, the explanation for this is stated. “I began to write with the help of my
grandfather [yes, it’s Alba who was the “I” on the first page]. … In his own
hand he wrote a number of pages … ” So
this explains the change of voice. It’s
actually quite effective, even though I was under the mistaken notion that when a stray “I” turns up from time to time, it's always Esteban. It’s effective because some of the most
intense passages proceed directly from Esteban’s violent reactions and
emotions, while the bulk of the book remains in the detached style I mentioned earlier.
The
House of the Spirits was not difficult to read – the style is limpid and
clear – but it wasn’t what I would call a “fun read,” either. I noted in some of the excerpts from reviews
at the beginning of the book, remarks were made about the book’s humor. I find it to be a very black variety of humor. For example, when Clara’s parents are killed
in an auto accident, her mother’s head gets cut off and nobody can find
it. Clara goes out searching for it and
finds it in the bushes. The body is
already buried, so she brings the head home and they keep it in the basement,
along with the Barrabás rug, for years. This
may be called humor, but it’s not funny; I would designate it dark
grotesquerie.
The
House of the Spirits is fascinating, compelling, overwhelming, and
unforgettable – certainly something I’m happy to have read. I’ll probably try my hand at more magic
realism in the future, but not immediately!
I need something lighter first!
One final thought: the author begins the book with an epigraph, a
brief poem by Pablo Neruda. It really
does characterize the theme of this great story – that the same stories are
lived over and over again and thus no one ever really dies.
How much does a man live, after
all?
Does he live a thousand days, or
one only?
For a week, or for several centuries?
How long does a man spend dying?
What does it mean to say “for ever”?
"The two volumes here comprise a classic first-contact
scifi story, and opposites attract romance, and a court intrigue "historical
novel". At least. And they all flow together smoothly into a satisfying whole.
The scifi part has the usual unexplainable "science" bits, but they are used
judiciously as vehicle, not hinges for the whole plot. The real science -- of
Linguistics, mainly, is accurate within its limits and well presented. The
romance is credible and the intrigue is made new again by being adapted to
structure of termite society and the realities of termite physiology (about
which we learn a good deal as well). The only complaints I have are to the
assumed panspermia (or whatever puts all discovered life forms on the terran
tree) and the needless complex (from a linguistic point of view, not from a
scifi novelist's) phonology of the termites."
"This and the next volume are novel retellings of best of epic myths. Transferring from demigods to termites refreshes the perennial
motifs and tales, while the mix of elements and the lively characters bring out
the nobility and low cunning, the humor and the pathos of these episodes. The
hero is all that that title implies, his companions the appropriate mix,
complete with internal tensions and hearty cameraderie. And the narrator is just
the right mix of keen observer and fussy pedant. And the tale continues into the
fourth and soon fifth volume! Hooray!"
"This is a very disturbing tale. As an allegory is quite
dark; as a scifi novella it is ultimately wrenching. It starts with a twisted
premise (even for an allegory) and then moves inexorably to its devastating
conclusion. I like all of Taylor's other works (as I have said elsewhere) but
this one creeps me out. Only the fact that Taylor is a very good writer (which makes the effect here more
affecting) keeps this from a one-star (or a 0, if that were possible)." 
