From Chile with Magic the House of the Spirits

By Patricia Blake

Chopin performed on the piano by invisible hands, a horse-size dog with crocodile claws who feeds on marmalade, chairs that dance and saltcellars that scamper across the dining table. These are some of the fantastic images in The House of the Spirits, a first novel by Isabel Allende that has captivated readers in Latin America and Western Europe. Published in Spanish in 1982, it quickly became a best seller in Spain and many Latin American countries. Foreign-language versions that appeared last year have sold 400,000 copies in France and kept the book on the best-seller list in West Germany since the beginning of 1985.

Allende, a former journalist, has even scored a success in her native Chile, despite the fact that the present government came to power after the 1973 assassination of her uncle, Marxist President Salvador Allende Gossens. Although the book is sympathetic to the dead leader, Chile's ruling junta has permitted the novel to pass through its stringent censorship.

Political undertones notwithstanding, The House of the Spirits is essentially a family saga encompassing four generations. The country is unnamed, though the character called the Candidate and later the President is manifestly Salvador Allende. Similarly, the Poet, whose verse everyone in the book seems to have memorized, is clearly Chile's late Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda. Ghostly happenings are commonplace in the great house of the "spirits" belonging to the Truebas. Eccentrics abound in that household. Rosa the Beautiful, for example, possesses a head of green hair that hangs "like a botanical mantle" down to her waist. Nicolas Trueba moves from one enterprise to another, successively teaching flamenco dancing, building a zeppelin, running a chicken-sandwich factory, traveling around India clad in an infant's diaper, and writing a 1,500-page treatise on the 99 names of God.

If all this has a familiar ring it is because Allende has self-consciously modeled her novel on Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, a four-generation family chronicle set in a nonexistent town. Allende's Rosa the Beautiful is obviously a stand-in for Garcia Marquez's Remedios the Beauty, famed for her spectacular ascension to heaven with the family laundry. The job-hopping Nicolas in The House of the Spirits doubles for One Hundred Years' mad inventor, Jose Arcadio Buendia, who strives to manufacture the philosophers' stone and photograph God.

Allende is not just an epigone of Garcia Marquez. Writing in the tradition of Latin America's magic realists, she has a singular talent for producing full- scale representational portraits with comic surreal touches. Her rendering of the Trueba patriarch Esteban and his wife Clara is a hilarious display of mismatching. While the crude, commonsensical Esteban is doomed by nature to cause constant offense to his wife, Clara the Clairvoyant irritates her spouse by her perpetual whispered concourse with the spirits.

Esteban's efforts to please Clara prove disastrous. After their wedding he can think of nothing better to present to his bride than the hide of her beloved dead dog Barrabas, turned into a rug and laid out at the foot of the marriage bed. "His two glass eyes stared up at her with the helpless look that is the specialty of taxidermists." Esteban's insensitiveness toward his wife extends beyond the grave. When Clara dies, the inconsolable widower begins wearing a suede pouch hanging under his shirt. "In it were his wife's false teeth, which he treated as a token of good luck and expiation." Indeed, he had knocked out her teeth in a quarrel years earlier.

The behavior of the next generation of Truebas is scarcely more sensible. Nicolas' twin Jaime is famous for literally giving his shirt away at the sight of a needy person. On one occasion he charitably removes his trousers in a public plaza, causing bystanders to cheer. Sister Blanca is regarded as the only normal member of the family because she shows "not the slightest inclination for her mother's spiritualism or her father's fits of rage." Still, she is the first among the clan's women to bed down outside her class.

The antic narrative is carried along by Allende's natural sense of fun until her characters reach the 1970s. At this juncture the Truebas are drawn into the violent confrontations between oligarchs and socialists that have afflicted modern Chile. The author here begins to exercise her skills as a journalist as she evokes the turbulent events she witnessed during the Marxists' electrifying rise and precipitous fall. Not surprisingly, magic subsides and realism takes over. Allende deftly turns her characters into archetypes of Latin America's left and right.

Allende's most persuasive pages describe the coup that felled her uncle and the terror that followed as it hits all the members of her fictional family, whatever their politics. Hers is an evenhanded account told with much poignancy. Regrettably, however, the novel stumbles to a close when the author falls back upon one of Garcia Marquez's hoariest literary devices: the discovery of an old manuscript that predicts the family's whole history. Though Allende's debut is full of promise, she still needs to break away from the domination of her unwitting mentor before she can fully display her distinctive voice.