Clara the Clairvoyant could interpret dreams.

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
The House of the Spirits is an epic tale of romance and rebellion, revolution and reconciliation. It chronicles the lives of Clara Del Valle and Esteban Trueba, an unlikely couple who weather disasters (both natural and personal) throughout their lengthy union. With Clara and Esteban, we experience Marxism and dictatorship, juntas and coups, the supernatural and the banal. As in any good magical realism epic, we follow several generations, and while the setting changes (in time and temperament) the core of the story is fundamentally unchanged. Allende explores love in all forms - lustful love, young love, guerrilla love, familial love, and love for your country.

Just to give you a sense of how intricate (and confusing) some of the relationships are in the book, I've included a family tree from someone's Prezi (don't worry, Prezis make me nauseous (or is it nauseated, grandma?) so I just included a screenshot). Anyway, it gives you an overall idea. ;)
Spoiler Over: Continue Here

I did not like this book when I started it. Tbqh, I didn't like it halfway through, or even nearing the end. Having completed it, my opinion is confuffled. That's the word I've decided to use, since all the others I wanted Weren't Quite Right. 

I do feel like the ending gave me a better sense of the whole narrative arc, and reading a bit about Chile and Allende herself after finishing made the work come into focus for me. I'll just come out and say it, so you can stop wondering: I hated the narrator. I loved the women in the book, and they were each unique, and fascinating, and compelling, flawed in all the right and wrong ways. The narrator, in what felt like an odd choice to me, was Esteban Trueba, the patriarch-to-be, lecherous, conservative, irascible, and (imho) downright unlikable. I don't understand if this is a literary thing that I just don't get (because we know it's happened before - Raskolnikov, Meursault) but I found it particularly odd given that Allende wrote such strong and empowered female characters but chose for her storyteller to be a male oppressor-of-sorts. 

Anyway, that's just my dos pesos. Onwards to the rest of my thoughts, as usual in no real order.

I've been thinking quite a lot about how best to resist in this bizarre waking nightmare of reality. I've protested and donated, worked to inform myself and support those most affected when I can, but when it comes down to it, I think the best resistance is deeply personal. In designing my second list, I was setting out to resist the status quo, deciding for myself and my readers what qualifies as 'classic'. So I return to my reading with renewed vigor, believing, as always, that fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. 

These lines struck me as I read:

• "But now I have begun to question my own hatred." Alba, Esteban's granddaughter, is taken by the junta (SPOILED! #sorrynotsorry) and even though she has every right to hate her captors, after she is freed she struggles to find the same venom in her heart. It made me think of the "Hate has no home here" signs I've seen in my neighborhood and across the country, and reminded me of my grandma - "Don't say hate, Meredith, it's such a strong word." Continue to resist I will and must, but hate I simply cannot.

• "After that terrible Tuesday, Alba had to rearrange her feelings in order to continue living." I think many of us have had to do some feelings rearranging to make it through these last few months, some communities and persons far more than others. I'd like to take a moment to celebrate everyone who's persevered despite persecution, and applaud those individuals and groups who are fighting the good fight.

• "Unfortunately she turned out to be an idealist, a family disease."  I love this line, as a fellow idealist in a diseased family. ;)

Since this novel is so family-centered, I'd like to paint you a portrait of the cast of characters. Here are my favorite tidbits to give you a snapshot (or should I say daguerreotype?) of each one:

Clara the Clairvoyant

"Clara lived in a universe of her own invention, protected from life's inclement weather."

"She dressed in white, because she had decided that it was the only color that did not change her aura." This made me think of a character on Numbers who only consumes white food, and also of Christopher Boone and his Battenberg cake. 

"At six she had discovered the magic books in the enchanted trunks of her legendary Great-Uncle Marcos and had fully entered the world-without-return of the imagination."

Nívea, the matriarch of the Del Valles, on Rosa

"She preferred not to torment her daughter with earthly demands, for she had a premonition that her daughter was a heavenly being, and that she was not destined to last very long in the vulgar traffic of this world." Rosa is Esteban's intended bride, Clara's older sister.

Uncle Marcos, explorer, voracious reader, adventurer extraordinaire

"Uncle Marcos's manners were those of a cannibal, as Severo put it. He spent the whole night making incomprehensible movements in the drawing room; later they turned out to be exercises designed to perfect the mind's control over the body and to improve digestion. He performed alchemy experiments in the kitchen, filling the house with fetid smoke and ruining pots and pans with solid substances that stuck to their bottoms and were impossible to remove."

"He sold his organ to a blind man and left the parrot to Clara, but Nana secretly poisoned it with an overdose of cod-liver oil, because no one could stand its lusty glance, its fleas, and its harsh, tuneless hawking of paper fortunes, sawdust balls, and powders for impotence." ahgahghaghagha.

"Marcos spent two weeks assembling the contents according to an instruction manual written in English, which he was able to decipher thanks to his invincible imagination and a small dictionary." zeugma! my favorite!

I loved Uncle Marcos and the almost lionizing presence he had over his family. He's featured only briefly in their early lives, but he leaves an indelible mark, much like my Uncle Chris.

Rosa the Beautiful, Clara the Clairvoyant, Beautiful Laura with the Long Blonde Hair
Many characters get epithets, which made me think of my grandma, who had a similar tendency to extended nomenclature. ;)

Nana, servant to the Del Valles, caretaker of children, creature of the night

When Clara stops speaking in her youth: "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. She had acquired the habit of gliding silently through the hallways and jumping in the dark, howling through the doorways, and hiding live animals between her sheets, but none of this elicited so much as a peep from the little girl. At times Clara lost her patience. She would throw herself on the floor, kicking and shouting, but without pronouncing a single word in any recognizable tongue; or she would scrawl on the tiny blackboard that never left her side, setting down the worst insults she could think of to say to the poor woman, who would weep disconsolately in the kitchen. 'It's for your own good, my little angel!' Nana would sob, wrapped in a bloody sheet, her face blackened with burnt cork." This was one of my favorite scenes in the whole book. :0)

The Mora Sisters (and Practical Magic - you put de lime in de coconut...)

I haven't mentioned much of it, but there's quite a bit of the mystical and magical in this novel. The Mora Sisters have magical powers, and they connect with the Del Valle ladies at several points throughout the story: "One Friday afternoon, three translucent ladies knocked at the door to the big house on the corner. They had eyes like sea mist, covered their heads with old-fashioned flowered hats, and were bathed in a strong scent of wild violets, which infiltrated all the rooms and left the house smelling of flowers for days after their visit."

Esteban Trueba, on the occult:"He maintained that magic, like cooking and religion, was a particularly feminine affair."

Férula, Esteban's sister, selfless, sad, and eventually sent away

Clara, to Férula, after she has gone away:"Férula, how I've needed your help to look after the family, you know I'm no good at domestic matters, the boys are terrible but Blanca is a lovely child, and the hydrangeas that you planted with your own two hands in Tres Marías turned out beautiful, some are blue because I put some copper coins in the fertilizer, it's a secret of nature, and every time I arrange them in a vase I think of you, but I also think of you when there aren't any hydrangeas, I always think of you, Férula, because the truth is that since you left no one has ever loved me as you did." Férula really grew on me, and I hated Esteban for kicking her out. I loved the line about the hydrangeas, because my mom told me about this as a child, and I thought it was the most magical thing in the world. Tres Marias is the family home for Esteban et al. and I liked that it made me think of Rosehaven, our erstwhile family farm.

Blanca, daughter of Clara and Esteban, mother to Alba, lover of Pedro Garcia

On Blanca's propensity for sculpting: "Blanca began to create tiny figures for the family's Christmas manger, not only the Three Kings and the shepherds, but a whole crowd of every kind of people and every type of animal - African camels and zebras, American iguanas and Asian tigers - without worrying about the exact fauna of Bethlehem. Afterward she added imaginary animals, gluing half an elephant to half a crocodile. Clara decided that if craziness can repeat itself in a family, then there must be a genetic memory that prevents it from being swallowed by oblivion." They continue to refer to her 'incredible crèches full of monsters', which I found hilarious. It also reminded me of years when our cats inhabit the crèche, or the suspicious absence of a certain baby's fingers...

Alba, daughter of Blanca, and Uncle Jaime, son of Esteban, twin to Nicolas, sister to Blanca

"Together they had invented certain imaginary games to entertain themselves on rainy afternoons. 'Bring on the elephant!' Uncle Jaime would command. Alba would go out and return pulling an imaginary pachyderm on an invisible rope. They could spend a good half hour giving him the herbs elephants like to eat, bathing his skin with mud to protect it from the harsh effects of bad weather, and polishing his ivory tusks while they heatedly discussed the advantages and disadvantages of living in the jungle." This was another uncle/niece relationship I found endearing, and I especially loved that Alba plays the cello, since my own epic Uncle Chris bought me my first and current cello.

And now for something completely different. I'm often struck by what a book reminds me of, and this book was no exception. Here is a nonexclusive list for your enjoyment. Do you need a break first? Here's a silly picture to look at while you take a break and stretch, pet your porcupine, have a cuppa:


All right, enough of that, let's get on with it!

Books this book reminded me of:

• One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Marquez" - "They say that I arrived covered with dust, without a hat, filthy and bearded, thirsty and furious, shouting for my bride."

• To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf - on Esteban reviving Tres Marías - "The entire house was carpeted with a thick layer of grass, dust, and dried-out leaves. It smelled like a tomb." I thought of this line: "The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it. The long night seemed to have set in; the trifling airs, nibbling, the clammy breaths, fumbling, seemed to have triumphed. The saucepan had rusted and the mat decayed."

• Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel García Marquez - "Marcos thought no woman in her right mind could remain impassive before a barrel-organ serenade." This screamed Florentino Ariza to me ;) Which is funny, because I just researched their publication dates, and Florentino wasn't even out in the world yet when this was published. 

• À la recherche du temps perdu - Marcel Proust
• "I would have loved her without interruption almost till infinity." This sounds like something Swann would say about Odette. ;)
• "I write that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously - as the three Mora sisters said, who could see the spirits of all eras mingled in space." "Are there perhaps other worlds more real than the waking world?" There's a little Vonnegut here, too - "I asked myself about the present - how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep."

• Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy - Pedro and Blanca reminded me of Tess and Angel, at least in the good old days: "They spent that summer oscillating between childhood, which still held them in its clasp, and their awakening as man and woman. There were times when they ran like little children, stirring up the chickens and exciting the cows, drinking their fill of fresh milk and winding up with foam mustaches, stealing fresh-baked bread straight from the oven and clambering up trees to build secret houses. At other times they hid in the forest's thickest, most secret recesses, making beds of leaves and pretending that they were married, caressing each other until they fell asleep exhausted."

• Hotel New Hampshire - John Irving - Barrabás and Sorrow, reanimated brothers from another mother: "Esteban pointed to the place where Clara was standing. It was the special surprise he had prepared for her. Clara looked down and gave a frightful cry; she was standing on the black back of Barrabás, who lay there split down the middle, transformed into a rug. His head was still intact and his two glass eyes stared up at her with the helpless look that is the specialty of taxidermists. Her husband managed to catch her before she fell to the floor in a dead faint. 'I told you she wasn't going to like it,' said Férula." lololololol. When will these families learn that taxidermy is Not a universally pleasing concept?

• Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes - "The worst thing is to be afraid of fear." I was completely blown away by the bravery of several characters, particularly following the coup and in the years of the junta's reign. I loved this line, and it felt like something DQ would say.

• Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury - "The books from Jaime's den were piled in the courtyard, doused with gasoline, and set on fire in an infamous pyre that was fed with the magic books from the enchanted trunks of Great-Uncle Marcos, the remaining copies of Nicolás's esoteric treatise, the leather-bound set of the complete works of Marx, and even Trueba's opera scores, producing a scandalous bonfire that filled the neighborhood with smoke and that, in normal times, would have brought fire trucks from every direction." So upsetting! Montag, come help!

• For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway - "Soldiers are not made to shine in times of peace." "Things like this never happened here." - The closest referent I felt in reading about the unnamed, but ostensibly Chile-like country where this novel was set, was Spain during the Civil War, and the unforgettable scene of reckoning in FWTBT. 

Do you need another break! What a long entry for someone who Didn't Really Like the Book, eh? Well, have another silly picture:

Last bit! 

Words, Words, Wonderful Words I did not know before but now I DO!

camellia - an evergreen eastern Asian shrub related to the tea plant, grown for its showy flowers and shiny leaves

cordillera - a system or group of parallel mountain ranges together with the intervening plateaus and other features, especially in the Andes or the Rockies

daguerreotype - a photograph taken by an early photographic process employing an iodine-sensitized silvered plate and mercury vapor (I like to imagine that's Uncle Marcos)

frou frou - a rustling noise made by someone walking in a dress; frills or other ornamentation, particularly of women's clothes (not to be confused with Imogen Heap's band)

patina - a green or brown film on the surface of bronze or similar metals, produced by oxidation over a long period; a gloss or sheen on wooden furniture produced by age and polishing; an impression or appearance of something (Did you guys ever play 'clean the pennies' as a kid? I know I did.)

Tyrolean - relating to or characteristic of the Austrian state of Tyrol or its inhabitants (Sure sure sure. Good ole' Tyrol! You know, everyone knows that. I found this gem of a picture when I googled "Tyrolean" in image search.)

zarzuela - a Spanish lyric-dramatic genre that alternates between spoken and sung scenes, the latter incorporating operatic and popular song, as well as dance

I'll leave you with a few final favorite lines:

"She was one of those stoical, practical women of our country. The kind of woman who's the pillar of many other lives. It was then I understood that the days of Colonel García and all those like him are numbered, because they have not been able to destroy the spirit of these women." The days of the Cheeto/Talking Yam are numbered, and we Nasty Women Will Persist. We know the future is female.

"For Alba, the most important person in the house and the strongest presence in her life was her grandmother. She was the motor that drove the magic universe." Grandma Rose, you are my inspiration, my lifeblood, my memory, and my heart. I read for you.

Onwards to Indigenous Daughter, or something of that ilk. Read, resist, and love, blobbists. À plus!