Mirror Magazine

Mirror Magazine

A saga of spirit
Books can open up new worlds for you and make you think differently. Smriti Daniel takes a closer look at one such book of a family saga

Title: The House Of The Spirits
Author: Isabel Allende
Price: Rs.950/-
Publisher: Black Swan
I’ve always had the strongest aversion to family sagas; I barely survived The Thorn Birds, and I made it through Gone With The Wind by the skin of the teeth (though I must confess that I’ll always love the last line – “and tomorrow is another day”). Most family sagas are, in my (somewhat cynical) opinion, excruciatingly painfully boring books, and are therefore to be avoided at all costs. So, you’ll understand why I almost ran for the hills when faced with The House Of The Spirits by Isabel Allende. Not only did the plot follow the lives of three generations of the Trueba family, there were also some hints of the supernatural, which had me believing that here was a book where Margaret Mitchell met Daphne Du Maurier (shudder).

But both Allende and the book came highly recommended, and now that I’ve finished the book (I was hooked from the first chapter), I’m a proud convert; perhaps not to the family saga thing, but definitely to Allende. She writes with such simplicity, humour and compassion that she has you all emotionally tangled up in her characters and their fates from the word go. In fact (as with any other great book) what the characters feel becomes what I feel, what they experience becomes what I experience. I took this book with me on holiday, and I’m glad I chose to, considering that spending the whole night up reading is not considered a legitimate reason to bunk work.

Following in the vein of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years Of Solitude), Allende is also a Latin-American writer, displaying much of the irreverent charm, deep seriousness and sheer entertainment value that Marquez does, but somehow also managing to carve out a very distinct niche of her own. She is a master of the genre of magic-realism; so much so that her readers accept without blinking the appearance of a dog the size of a horse; even the fact that Rosa has naturally green hair does not shatter your faith. As the book progresses and all the characters act out their parts, and all the multiple plots twine and meet, one feels a sense of ‘rightness’ (for the lack of a better word) and a real involvement in all the hair-pin bends the story takes.

Her characters, more than even the events in the book, are utterly enchanting. While you meet many of them, you are never allowed to feel indifferent to any, simply because Allende gives them so much vitality and sheer verve that you find yourself immediately drawn to each of them as they appear. It is in many ways a novel of conflict and redemption (with many historical and social observation slipped in), but to dismiss it as such would be an injustice, because it encompasses all the length, breadth and richness of life itself.

This was Allende’s first book and I think it’s a tribute to her mammoth talent that no one even bothers with patronising comments along the lines of ‘a sparkling debut’; instead she is accepted as a writer of consequence without further ado. Since The House Of The Spirits she has written 15 books, with all of them receiving much critical acclaim. Her books have been translated into 27 languages and she has won over 27 awards. Also (for those who set store by such things), Daughter Of Fortune is on Oprah’s book club list.

But all that only makes for great trappings; what matters in the end is the book itself. I found myself laughing and crying, smiling and sighing all the way through this wonderful novel; a fate that I would quite happily wish on you.

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