The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende - 1982
Introduction
The House of the Spirits, the first novel by Isabel Allende, was published in Spanish in 1982; an English translation appeared in 1985. The novel is set in Chile and tells the saga of the Trueba family through three generations in the twentieth century. The narrative starts in the early 1900s and ends a year after the 1973 coup d'état that ended the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, Isabel Allende's uncle, and installed a military dictatorship that lasted through 1989.
Allende approaches the theme of war and peace in relation to the political divisiveness that gripped the country in the years following World War II. These divisions originated in the economic gap between the landowning elite and the working classes, and were aggravated by the violent military coup d'état. The coup, led by General Augusto Pinochet, deposed the democratically elected Socialist government and initiated a war against the Chilean population. Allende places fictional characters in the midst of these events, basing her descriptions on documented facts.
In an interview with Magdalena García Pinto entitled "Espejo de Escritores" (Mirror of Writers), Allende notes that the novel began as a letter to her dying grandfather.
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