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The all new 50 Books Challenge!
Title: The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende, translated by Magda Bogin
Details: Copyright 1982, English translation copyright 1985, Simon and Schuster
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "The House of the Spirits brings to life the triumphs and tragedies of three generations of the Trueba family. The patriarch, Esteban, is a volatile, proud man whose voracious pursuit of political power is tempered only by his love for his delicate wife, Clara, a woman with a mystical connection to the spirit world. When their daughter Blanca embarks on a forbidden love affair in defiance of her implacable father, the result is an unexpected gift to Esteban: his adored granddaughter Alba. This beautiful and strong-willed child will lead her family and her country into a revolutionary future.
One of the most important novels of the twentieth century, The House of the Spirits is an enthralling epic that spans decades and lives, weaving the personal and the political into a universal story of love, magic, and fate."
Why I Wanted to Read It: If you've been reading this challenge even a little, you know crime fiction is one of my least favorite genres and magical realism is one of my lifelong, most favorite genres. So it's kind of weird that it's taken me so long to finally read Isabel Allende's work, as she is renown as a master of the genre. I set out to fix that by starting with a book I'd heard about, although somehow never enough to discern the plot or really anything about it, other than that it was a masterpiece, and a masterpiece of magical realism.
How I Liked It: CONTENT WARNING! THIS BOOK CONTAINS SEXUAL VIOLENCE (INCLUDING TO CHILDREN), TORTURE, MURDER, AND SUICIDE, AND THE REVIEW MAKES MENTION OF IT. PLEASE PROCEED ACCORDINGLY.
You love to see it. The TV show your sister has insisted you watch finally gets good and you get it. The band your friend adores and recommends has an album you love. The movie all critics swear by takes a turn and starts speaking to you. It's a wonderful feeling when lauded art starts earning its reputation.
But first, let's meet the family! (MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD)
The del Valle family are well-to-do, but progressive on a number of levels. The father belongs to the Liberal party and the mother is one of the country (Chile)'s first feminists. They also have many children, but the most important ones are Rosa the Beautiful, a gorgeous, ethereal girl engaged to Esteban Trueba, a miner, and her very little sister Clara, who has all sorts of interesting powers like mind-reading, telekinesis, and communication with spirits.
When Rosa is poisoned by one of her father's political enemies, her death hits the family hard, especially little Clara, only ten, who witnesses her older sister's grotesque autopsy (complete with light necrophilia, a detail that's helped keep this book on the "banned/frequently challenged" list) and descends into muteness for nearly a decade after, writing everything down (including an extensive journal). Her father swears off his political career while her mother plunges further into feminism, including women's suffrage.
Also hit hard is a frequent narrator of the book (although the book is mostly told in third person), Rosa's fiancé, Esteban Trueba. From a rich family whose father squandered their wealth, leaving them in ruin, he works hard in the mines and also to fix up his family's sprawling (but neglected to the point of near ruin) estate in the country, Tres Marías. He hires the first peasant to whom he speaks, Pedro Segunda, a man with otherworldly knowledge of the land and healing. Meanwhile, as he copes with life without Rosa, he grows his fortune and his distinct political views as well as what he feels are his entitlements. He feels entitled to help himself to underage peasant girls whenever he has a sexual craving, including a decision that will definitely come back to him (more on that later!), Pancha García, a fifteen-year-old he rapes, impregnates, and then ignores (one of many).
When he hears his mother is dying (attended by his sister Férula), he goes to see her and she makes clear her wish that he marry and have children that share his name, and presumably their family line. Properly shamed, thirty-something Trueba returns to the de Valles, this time to ask to marry now nineteen-year-old Clara, who foretold both his coming and the fact she would indeed marry him, without love.
Clara welcomes the now lonely Férula to live with them, and they become close, the family enjoying the now-wealthy Trueba's city mansion while keeping an eye on Tres Marías and summering there. Clara is involved with her spiritualism and other occult pursuits while Férula takes care of the running of the house (since such things don't really occur to Clara).
Clara becomes pregnant with a girl, Blanca, and then later two twin boys, Jaime and Nicolás. While she isn't in love with Trueba, Clara likes him fine, but that's not enough for Trueba, who is obsessed with her and jealous of both her spiritualist pursuits and of his own sister, who Trueba throws out of his home(s) never to return after finding her sleeping in the same bed next to his wife. Férula curses him that he will shrink away and die like a dog, unloved.
In Tres Marías, young Blanca meets a little boy named Pedro Tercero, son of Trueba's foreman, and they're friends from toddlerhood on, practically. Nearly inseparable playmates as children, they're lovers as teenagers, with the added complication of Tercero's revolutionary leanings and yearning for better life in Chile that benefits all people, not just patróns like Esteban Trueba.
After an earthquake shatters life for the Trueba family, they leave behind their city mansion and move permanently to Tres Marías, where Blanca fakes illness to be sent home from her prestigious boarding school to spend time with her love (her brothers, on the other hand, are happy with their British-style boarding school).
Complications arise when a visiting French count, Jean de Satigny, cuts a distinctive figure across the family. He's interested in Blanca for marriage, but after witnessing her sneaking out to be with Tercero, he realizes the crimp in his plans. He tells her father what he saw, and her father, infuriated, charges after her. He brutally beats his daughter, and when Clara attempts to intervene, for the first time he looses his rage on her as well, hitting her hard enough to make her briefly lose consciousness (as well as her front teeth). Clara vows to never speak to him again and flees back to the city with Blanca.
Alone in the huge country estate (the French count exits in horror during Trueba's rage), Trueba blames Tercero for everything and puts a bounty on his head. Furious and depressed, he hunts Tercero himself, and gets surprising help from a little boy named Esteban García, who happens to be the grandson of Pancha García, who in her betrayal and rage, has told her little grandson everything including that he is biologically the grandson of the patrón (and should therefore be entitled to his estate). Little García tells Trueba none of this, but leads the man to where Tercero is hiding. Trueba only gets as far as cutting off three fingers with an axe, though, fingers which the little boy dutifully collects, further horrifying Trueba, who sends him off with no cash reward.
Meanwhile, Blanca has discovered she is pregnant, and word gets back to her father. Her father, absolutely apoplectic, hunts down the French count, literally dragging him with him to Blanca, and gets Blanca to agree to marriage with the Count by telling her he killed Tercero. Stunned and beyond depressed, Blanca agrees, sobbing through the wedding (at the reception, she only stops crying when her mother, who opposed the forced marriage, tells her it's bad for the baby and that she dreamed Tercero is still alive and so he must be). Blanca's further relieved to discover that her new husband has apparently no interest in sex with her, but that relief falls short when she realizes he's engaging in all sorts of sexual activities (complete with photography, which she finds) with their servants (who clearly don't appear to care for Blanca; one leaves a dead lizard on her plate). She flees by train back to her family home in the city to her mother, giving birth almost at once.
Her brothers have matured. Jaime is a serious, thoughtful doctor, and Nicolás, a flashy hotshot with a string of weird failed business ventures and girlfriends, the current being proto-hippie/possible Beatnik Amanda, looking after her much younger little brother Miguel. Both are present when Blanca returns, and Miguel witnesses the birth of the first (acknowledged) Trueba grandchild, named Alba, with Rosa the Beautiful's strange green hair.
Meanwhile, Trueba has left Tres Marías and is spending time with his family in the city, plotting a run for Senate, where he is ultimately successful. Nicolás goes off to India and returns a changed man, deeply spiritual and thoughtful. The entire family raises little Alba in different ways. Her grandfather is surprisingly enamored with her, doting on her and spoiling her (and being a better parent than he's been to his children). Her grandmother teaches her spiritualism, her uncle Jaime allows her to read his vast medical textbooks and thinks of her as his own daughter, and her uncle Nicolás teaches her various means of spiritual endurance he has learned in India. And of course, she has her mother, Blanca, who explains the absence of a father by saying her father the Count died in the dessert.
All of this helps her get through her grandmother's sudden (but peaceful) death, which rocks the family. Blanca sees Tercero frequently again and he and Alba meet and like one another, but neither realizes they are related (although Tercero might suspect). Meanwhile, Trueba rises to power and his son Nicolás humiliates him publicly one too many times with his bizarre antics (all eagerly picked up by Trueba's political rivals), and is banished to North America. Things are changing in Chile and heating up. Tercero gains fame as a folk singer and a revolution is brewing. Later in college, Blanca meets Miguel, now a revolutionary fighter, and they fall in love. Her uncle Jaime, a socialist, warns that Miguel's tactics could be trouble, but Blanca ignores this advice.
When the first socialist President is elected, some of the family rejoices, but Trueba is making plans with his conservative allies to undermine and overthrow the government. Adding to Trueba's fury, Tres Marías is seized by its workers, and Trueba is briefly held captive when he tries to break back in (he is freed by Tercero, at Blanca's request; Blanca also in convincing Tercero to help her reveals to both him and Alba that he is indeed Alba's father).
A military coup backed by the United States installs a dictatorship, and Trueba seizes Tres Marías again, and burns the homes and slaughters the animals of the workers who once seized it from him in his fury. But that's not all that's changing. Tercero is a wanted man and he and Blanca must flee to Canada, never to see their family again. The President is murdered and arranged for it to look like a drunken suicide. Jaime, who was mistakenly seized, is promised freedom (after torture) if he gives the suicide lie. He refuses, and is tortured and then murdered in a concentration camp, along with other dissidents.
Trueba refuses to believe his son's death, even when a sympathetic guard (who was kind to Jaime, as he remembered him helping save his mother) delivers the news at the risk of his life.
But things are more serious and Trueba has a dangerous enemy. The little boy that's the grandson of the teenage girl he raped and then denied a cash reward (but not before making him witness an attempted murder and disfigurement), has grown up unsurprisingly evil.
He turns up at the Trueba house when Alba is a little girl looking for Trueba's endorsement to be a police official (he gets it, with Trueba thinking it's a good idea to repay the debt of the reward finding Tercero he never gave García and also would acquire a useful friend on the force), but not before he sexually molests little Alba and also puts a hand around her little neck, fantasizing about strangling her to death.
He returns to sexually harass her as a teenage girl (roughly the age his grandmother was when Trueba raped her) by forcing a kiss on her.
Finally, he seizes upon Blanca as a young protester in university, and with his special surveillance, he manages to collect her as the girlfriend of dangerous Marxist rebel Miguel, and she's arrested, tortured, and repeatedly raped, all presumably to give up Miguel's whereabouts, but the three of her fingers sent to Trueba is a grisly suggestion that it's more than that.
She prays for death but her grandmother's spirit refuses to let her and urges her to write (in her mind) to preserve herself. Finally, with the help of a sex worker her grandfather helped many, many years before who has built her own empire (and considerable political allegiances), Tránsito Soto, Alba is returned to her grandfather, who dies not long after, peacefully, only fulfilling part of his sister's curse (he has mysteriously shrunk throughout his life, for no known medical reason). Alba discovers she is pregnant and takes over narration, not knowing whether or not her baby is Miguel's or that of her rapists' (primarily Esteban García's), but vowing to love it and to not seek revenge and thus to try to break the cycle of violence.
Got all of that? Because it's a lot.
I went into this book knowing very little about it, other than that it's considered a classic of magical realism, and an extremely questionable (re: racist and whitewashed) movie version of the book was made in the 1990s. So I was surprised to learn it was a translation, and not by the original author. I haven't had good luck with that in the past. But some excellent books in the past few years have helped me realize such a translation can indeed be done successfully. Despite those positive experiences though, I was still leery.
And the book has a bit of a slow start. We meet the fascinating del Valle family, but the opening scene focuses more on their creepy, sanctimonious priest, and not even tiny Clara's loud question (somewhat questionably "Psst! Father Restrepo! If that story about hell is a lie, we've all fucked, aren't we..." which is somewhat weird for a small child from a family where we don't hear the parents or other adults swearing like that) distracts from the force of this figure.
While we get some family action, including Clara's abilities, Rosa the Beautiful's death follows up an almost straightforward clump of narration by/primary focus on her fiancé, Esteban Trueba. And Trueba is, to put it mildly, a tricky character.
He's an almost serial and brutal sexual predator of young girls, something the book treats with disarming frankness (and never tries to soften). While he's working on building up the family estate that was left in ruin, his sexual appetites go up, and without even the possibility of a wife, he's pretty pent up:
When he began to look with concupiscent eyes at the birds in the corral, the children playing naked in the orchard, and even at raw bread dough, he understood that his virility would not be soothed by priestly substitutes. (pg 63)
It's not much a surprise that he can go from getting sexual thoughts about children playing nude to in nearly the next scene, abducting and raping a teenage girl, with whom he then grooms into a sort of a relationship (at least after the first rape). He installs her as one of his household staff, and she soon becomes pregnant.
Esteban was slow to notice [the pregnancy], for he hardly looked at her anymore; his first enthusiasm having waned, he rarely caressed her either. He simply used her as a hygienic method for relieving the tensions of the day and obtaining a good night's sleep. (pg 70)
And he's no sooner gotten Pancha García pregnant than his eye starts wandering again.
He looked out the window and saw a slender little girl hanging up the wash on a wire. She could not have been more than thirteen or fourteen years old, but she was fully developed. Just then she turned and looked at him; she had the expression of a woman. (pg 70)
Yikes.
He helps himself to a considerable portion of the young girls of the village, raping and creating plenty a pregnancy, for which he takes no responsibility and chases off the girls' avenging families with threats of violence so often that they stop even trying (after all, he is the patrón and they are but peasants).
Not a girl passed from puberty to adulthood that he did not subject to the woods, the riverbank, or the wrought-iron bed.(pg 71)
On top of that, he's a hardcore believer in some pretty horrible politics, including the abuse of his workers.
In vain, Pedro Segundo García and the old priest from the nun's hospital tried to suggest to him that it was not little brick houses or pints of milk that made a man a good employer or an honest Christian, but rather giving his workers a decent salary instead of slips of pink paper, a workload that did not grind their bones to dust, and a little respect and dignity. Trueba would not listen to this sort of thing: it smacked, he said, of Communism.
"They're degenerate ideas," he muttered. "Bolshevik ideas designed to turn the tenants against me. What they don't realize is that these poor people are completely ignorant and uneducated. They're like children, they can't handle responsibility." (pgs 71 and 72)
This isn't Europe. What you need here is a strong government, with a strong man. It would be lovely if we were all created equal, but the fact is we're not. It couldn't be more obvious. The only one who knows how to work around here is me, and I defy you to prove otherwise. (pgs 72 and 73)
He figured when he was ready to have children he would find a woman of his own class, with the blessings of the Church, because the only ones who really counted were the ones who bore their father's surname; the others might just as well not have been born. And he would have none of that monstrous talk about everyone being born with the same rights and inheriting equally, because if that happened, everybody would go to hell and civilization would be thrown back to the Stone Age. (pg 74)
It takes his mother dying and Trueba going back to the del Valle family for another daughter (Clara) for the book to find its hook as Clara comes fully into her own as a character. Given what little I had read of the book's plot (and given the book's description on the back), I knew there was no way the author was trying to justify or sympathize with men like Trueba, but it was still hard to get into the book when he was the star.
Smitten with Clara (and we the readers are, too), Trueba becomes no better of a man, although he might try:
His hands felt very heavy, his feet felt very big, his voice very hard, his beard very scratchy, and his habits of rape and whoring very deeply ingrained, but even if he had to turn himself inside out like a glove, he was prepared to do everything in his power to seduce her. (pgs 107 and 108)
Frankly, even when the book shifts to other characters, Trueba is obviously still a main character and he's a quite terrible person. The whole family is aware of the fact he's a rapist and has left a wake of uncared-for children that bear his genes (but not his last name, care, or financial support):
Every time she stood by him, he grabbed at her, confusing her, in his invalid's disturbed state of mind, with the robust peasant women who in his early days had served him both in kitchen and bed. Clara felt that she was too old for that sort of thing. Misfortune has spiritualized her, and age and her lack of love for her husband had led her to think of sex as a rather crude form of amusement that made her joints ache and knocked the furniture around. (pg 183)
(That passage comes when Esteban is recovering from having numerous bones in his body broken during the great earthquake and Clara cared for him. Clara, who incidentally would've been "too old for that sort of thing" in her thirties, but given her husband's proclivities, why wouldn't she think that?
For a second I toyed with the fantasy that Tránsito was the woman I had always needed and that with her by my side I could return to the days when I was able to lift a sturdy peasant woman in the air, pull her up onto my horse's haunches, and carry her off into the bushes against her will. (pg 352)
Actually, we hardly agreed on anything. I don't think my bad disposition was to blame for all of it, because I was a good husband, nothing like the hothead I had been when I was a bachelor. She was the only woman for me. She still is.
One day, Clara had a bolt installed on her bedroom door and after that she never let me in her bed again, except when I forced myself on her and when to have said no would have meant the end of our marriage. (pg 199)
Clara and her husband fall out and she sleeps in a separate room, but Trueba doesn't take it well.
I drilled a hole in the bathroom wall so I could watch her naked, but it got me so excited I decided to plaster it over. To hurt her feelings, I pretended I was going to the Red Lantern, but all she said was that it was a lot better than raping peasant girls, which surprised me, because I didn't think she knew about that. As a result of her comments, I tried rape again, just to see if it would get a rise out of her, but time and the earthquake had taken their toll on my virility. I no longer had the strength to grab a sturdy peasant girl by the waist and swing her up onto my saddle, much less rip her clothes off and enter her against her will. I was of an age when you need help and tenderness if you're going to make love. I was old, damn it. (pgs 200 and 201)
When forcing his pregnant daughter Blanca into marriage, she reveals she's been paying closer attention than he thought.
"Be quiet!" he roared. "You're getting married. I don't want any bastards in the family, do you hear me?"
"I thought we already had several," Blanca replied. (pg 238)
In addition to being a serial, unrepentant rapist (including of young, underage girls), committing marital rape (and also whatever level of sexual violence stalking and spying on his unawares nude wife would constitute), Trueba also steals the corpse of his first fiancé, Rosa the Beautiful, when denied it by the family, so he can be buried between his "two great loves", Clara and Rosa.
So you see, Trueba being the character of focus is not a great hook into the book's story, not starting out, anyway. In addition to his abusive and violent tendencies, his politics are as bad.
In Trueba's opinion, the time had arrived for him to come out in defense of the national interest and of the Conservative Party, since no one better personified the honest, uncontaminated politician, as he himself declared, adding that he had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, and not only that, had created jobs and a decent life for all his workers and owned the only hacienda with little brick houses. He respected the law, the nation, and tradition, and no one could accuse him of any greater offense than tax evasion. (pg 249)
"Here, son. I'm glad you've chosen that profession. If you want to around armed, you might as well be a policeman. That way you have impunity."(pg 320)
(That'd be Trueba congratulating his (unacknowledged) grandson born of rape who would later go on to terrorize the family, especially Trueba's granddaughter.)
Trueba has no patience for his socialist son Jaime:
With the same tenacity his father had brought to the task of lifting Tres Marías out of ruin and making his fortune, he spent his strength working in the clinic and treating the poor without charge in his spare time.
"You're a hopeless loser, son," Trueba would say, sighing. "You have no sense of reality. You've never taken stock of how the world really is. You put your faith in utopian values that don't even exist."
"Helping one's neighbor is a value that exists."
"No. Charity, like Socialism, is an invention of the weak to exploit the strong and bring them to their knees." (pg 330)
"The day we can't get our hands on the ballot boxes before the vote is counted we're done for," Trueba argued. (pg 340)
"Yes, but it's not just Communists. There are Socialists, radicals, and lots of other splinter groups. They're all pretty much the same," Trueba replied.
To Senator Trueba, all political parties except his own were potentially Marxist, and he could not distinguish one ideology from another. (pg 341)
He was astute enough to be the first to call the left "the enemy of democracy," never suspecting that years later that would be the slogan of the dictatorship. (pg 342)
When a democratic election actually happens and the people get what they want (a Socialist President), Trueba's allies are horrified and defeated, but Trueba's a fighter:
"It's one thing to win an election and quite another to be President," he remarked mysteriously to his teary coreligionists. (pg 380)
(File that under "Lines That Hit Differently in 2022"-- more on that later!)
It's an interesting choice to have a character as thoroughly unlikable as Trueba dictate so much of the book. He never quite ventures into cartoon cruelty territory, mostly by virtue of his being a main character, but not entirely. By giving us his point of view, the author also gives us his motivations, and the fact he contradicts himself in the text ("I was a good husband, nothing like the hothead I had been when I was a bachelor") shows he's not just a villain, he truly believes he's in the right, even when the book is all but pointing out he is absolutely not.
But still, I was feeling rather disappointed that a book I'd been anticipating so much wasn't snagging me until Clara becomes a main character again. She's a fascinating counterpoint to Trueba and a fascinating character period. The book suddenly takes off and keeps going. It truly delivers home why it has such a reputation for being a masterpiece.
I'm reminded a lot of two books, both of them I love very much. The magical realism angle reminds me of Practical Magic (the first book ONLY, not the sequels and prequels that came over twenty years later and have tweaked cannon so much they practically qualify as their own universe)'s whimsical and yet matter-of-fact approach to the otherwordly (yes, that's pretty much the definition of magical realism, but some books follow it more straightforwardly than others), whereas the generational saga (and the book making you laugh, making you scared, and making you think) reminded me of the brilliant and breathtaking Fall on Your Knees. This is an absolutely brilliant book that deserves every bit of its reputation and more.
This was apparently the author's very first novel. I can't quite tell if it shows, as I haven't yet read more of her work, but I do know that there are a couple missteps that seem to align with a first novel (the slightly uneven pacing in a few places, complications with plotting and pay off) but don't get me wrong, the attributes of the book far beyond outweigh the flaws. The translation works well (save for a few curious places that may or may not be the fault of the translation) and appears to capture all of the author's intended magic.
But this isn't just a fascinating, captivating read. It feels like it's also a necessary one.
Because while this is more or less billed as a generational saga, it leaves out that this is an excellent crash course in Chilean history. The way ideas spread, how they were suppressed, who was in power and who wasn't, the prevailing attitudes of the times, and you feel like you're there. I was surprised to learn that the author has a connection to the Chilean President Salvador Allende, first Socialist President of Latin America and whose death still strikes controversy (was he assassinated by the incoming authoritarian regime? Did he really die by suicide like the coup claimed? Did he die by fighting the coup?). President Allende is the first cousin of the author's father and in the book, he is referred to only as the President (and the people don't believe the suicide story). A look at the author's biography notes that she had to flee her home country of Chile after the authoritarian regime moved in, and understandably, the book itself would be shaped by these events.
With that in mind, though, the book (and the author) don't take a simple approach to the answer of the country's survival. While obviously authoritarians (and rapists) like Trueba and García are shown to be ugly, violent, and vengeful, the author places their actions as part of a larger system.
When Alba's release from the concentration camp is secured, she's flung in an alley and collected by a small boy and his mother who care for her. She says of the mother:
She was one of those stoical, practical women of our country, the kind of woman who has a child with every man who passes through her life and, on top of that, takes in other people's abandoned children, her own poor relatives, and anybody else who needs a mother, a sister, or an aunt; the kind of woman who's the pillar of many other lives, who raises her children to grow up and leave her and lets her men leave too, without a word of reproach, because she has more pressing things to worry about. She looked like so many others I had met in the soup kitchens, in my Uncle Jaime's clinic, at the church office where they would go for information on their disappeared, and in the morgue where they would go to find their dead. I told her she had run an enormous risk rescuing me, and she smiled. 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. (pgs 476 and 477)
Later, she reflects on what's come before, and what's ahead.
When I was in the doghouse [at the concentration camp], I wrote in my mind that one day Colonel García would stand before me in defeat and that I would avenge myself on all those who need to be avenged. But now I have begun to question my own hatred. Within a few short weeks, ever since I have returned to the house, it seems to have become diluted, to have lost its sharp edge. I am beginning to suspect that nothing that happens is fortuitous, that it all corresponds to a fate laid down before my birth, and that Esteban García is part of the design. He is a crude, twisted line, but no brushstroke is in vain. The day my grandfather tumbled his grandmother, Pancha García, among the rushes of the riverbank, he added another link to the chain of events that had to complete itself. Afterward the grandson of the woman who was raped repeats the gesture with the granddaughter of the rapist, and perhaps forty years from now my grandson will knock García's granddaughter down among the rushes, and so on down through the centuries in an unending tale of sorrow, blood, and love.[...]
And now I seek my hatred and cannot seem to find it. I feel its flame going out as I come to understand the existence of Colonel García and the others like him, as I understand my grandfather and piece things together from Clara's notebooks, my mother's letters, the ledgers of Tres Marías, and the many other documents spread before me on the table. It would be very difficult for me to avenge all those who should be avenged, because my revenge would be just another part of the same inexorable rite. I have to break that terrible chain. I want to think that my task in life and that my mission is not to prolong hatred but simply to fill these pages while I wait for Miguel, while I bury my grandfather, whose body lies beside me in this room, while I wait for better times to come, while I carry this child in my womb, the daughter of so many rapes or perhaps of Miguel, but above all, my own daughter. (pgs 479, 480, 481)
(I should note that the book has the conceit of existing because Alba and Trueba want to tell their family's story, and are partially able to do so thanks to Clara's meticulous notebooks for decades, since she was child, which opens and closes the book.)
But while the author ultimately settles on a bigger picture approach, that doesn't mean she doesn't have some points to offer in the meantime.
When Trueba suffers fears of Communism hard enough to power an entire Eisenhower era, his concerns are rebuffed by his political peers:
"Marxism doesn't stand a chance in Latin America. Don't you know it doesn't allow for the magical side of things? It's an atheistic, practical, functional doctrine. There's no way it can succeed here!" (pg 340)
More interesting to me in particular is the conflict between the Socialist Jaime and the Marxist Miguel, both allies with very different approaches (that again still have resonance in 21st century America).
The pace of events escalated during the final months of the campaign. Portraits of the candidates were on every wall; pamphlets were dropped from airplanes and carpeted the streets with printed refuse that fell from the sky like snow. Radios howled the various party slogans and preposterous wagers were made by party members on both sides. At night gangs of young people took to the streets to attack their ideological rivals. Enormous demonstrations were organized to measure the popularity of each party, and each time the city was jammed with the same numbers of people. Alba was euphoric, but Miguel explained that the election was a joke and that whoever won, it would make no difference because you would just be changing the needle on the same old syringe, and that you cannot make a revolution at the ballot box but only with the people's blood. The ideas of a peaceful, democratic revolution with complete freedom of expression was a contradiction in terms.
"That poor boy is crazy!" Jaime explained when Alba told him what Miguel had said. "We're going to win and he'll have to swallow his words." (pg 372)
They were convinced that since they had come to power through legal means, no one could take it away from them, at least not until the next Presidential election.
"They're fools! They don't realize that the right is arming itself!" Miguel said to Alba. (pg 390)
Alba wanted to hand the confiscated weapons over to Miguel, but her Uncle Jaime convinced her that Miguel was no less a terrorist than her grandfather and that it would be better to get rid of them in such a way that they would not harm anyone. (pg 391)
Jaime did his best to seem indifferent, but in the end, Miguel captivated him. He had matured, and was no longer an excitable youth, but his politics had not changed in the least; he still believed that it would be impossible to defeat the right without a violent revolution. Jaime did not agree, but he was fond of Miguel and admired his courage. Nevertheless, he could not help thinking of him as one of those fatal men possessed by a dangerous idealism and an intransigent purity that color everything they touch with disaster, especially the women who have the misfortune to fall in love with them. He also disliked his ideological position; he was convinced that left-wing extremists like Miguel were doing more to harm the President than those on the right. (pg 394)
Alba is rather nastily nicknamed "Countess" at her university for coming from a privileged background (little do they know just exactly how privileged) but she shares in the leftist beliefs of her beloved uncle Jaime and her love Miguel, and attends organizing, including where she has a bad menstrual period and isn't exactly treated with sympathy.
By evening Alba was crying in humiliation and pain, terrified by the pinchers in her guts and by this stream of blood that was so unlike her usual flow. She thought something must be bursting inside her. Ana Díaz, a student who, like Miguel, wore the insignia of the raised fist, observed that only rich women suffer from such pains; proletarian women do not complain even when they give birth. But when she saw that Alba's pants were a pool of blood and she was as pale as death, she went to speak to Sebastián Gómez, who said he had no idea how to resolve the problem.
"That's what happens when you let women get involved in men's affairs!" he roared.
"No! It's what happens when you let the bourgeoisie into the affairs of the people!" the young woman answered him indignantly. (pgs 359 and 360)
It would've been really easy for the author to have simple villains and simple heroes, and credit to her for these nuanced characters (Ana Díaz later shows up in Alba's life again, this time in a much different way).
And if some of those lines quoted above gave you chills with their relevancy, just you wait.
We're not interested in a military coup, General," the head of Embassy intelligence replied in studied Spanish. "We want Marxism to be a colossal failure and for it to fall alone, so we can erase it from the people's minds throughout the continent. You understand? We're going to solve this problem with money. We can still buy a few members of Congress so they won't confirm him as President. It's in your Constitution; he didn't get an absolute majority, and Congress has to make the final choice."
"Get that idea out of your head, mister!" Trueba exclaimed. "You're not going to bribe anyone around here! The Congress and the armed forces are above corruption. It would be better if we used the money to buy the mass media. That would give us a way to manipulate public opinion, which is the only thing that really counts."
"You're out of your mind! The first thing the Marxists are going to do is destroy freedom of the press!" several voices said.
"Believe me, gentlemen," Senator Trueba replied. "I know this country. They'll never do away with freedom of the press. Besides, it's in their platform: they've sworn to respect democratic rights. We'll catch them in their own trap."
Senator Trueba was right. They were unable to bribe the members of Congress, and on the date stipulated by law the left calmly came into power. And on that date the right began to stockpile hatred. (pgs 381 and 382)
Yes, really. No word on whether Roger Ailes ever read this book.
Organization was necessary, because the "road to Socialism" quickly became a battlefield. While the people were celebrating their victory, letting their hair and beards grow, addressing each other as "compañero," rescuing forgotten folklore and native crafts, and exercising their new power in lengthy meetings of workers where everyone spoke at once and never agreed on anything, the right was carrying out a series of strategic actions designed to tear the economy to shreds and discredit the government. They controlled the mass media and possessed nearly limitless financial resources, as well as the support of the gringos, who had allocated secret funds for the program of sabotage. Within a few months the results could be seen. For the first time in their lives, people had enough money to cover their basic needs and to buy a few things they had always wanted, but now they were unable to do so because the stores were nearly empty. Shortages of goods, which was soon to be a collective nightmare, had begun. (pgs 385 and 386)
Worth horribly noting that partially behind the sabotage of the Socialist regime and the installation of the coup and dictatorship was none other than (wait for it!) the United States, part of a long history of our meddling in Chile.
In the hysteria to get things, there were all sorts of confusions: people who had never smoked wound up paying an exorbitant sum for a pack of cigarettes, and those without children found themselves fighting over cans of baby formula. (pgs 386 and 387)
Yes, baby formula.
Soldiers nervously patrolled the streets, cheered by many people who had wished for the government's defeat. Some of them, emboldened by the violence of the past few days, stopped all men with long hair or beards, unequivocal signs of a rebel spirit, and all women dressed in slacks, which they cut to ribbons because they felt responsible for imposing order, morality, and decency. The new authorities announced they had nothing to do with actions of this sort and had never given orders to cut beards or slacks, and that it was probably the work of Communists disguised as soldiers attempting to cast aspersions on the armed forces and make the citizenry hate them. Neither slacks nor beards were forbidden, they said, although of course they preferred men to shave and wear their hair short, and women to wear dresses. (pg 415)
Is that like how the only truly violent people at the 1/6 insurrection were all "secretly antifa"?
Censorship, which at first covered only the mass media, was soon extended to textbooks, song lyrics, movie scripts, and even private conversation. There were words prohibited by military decree, such as the world "compañero," and others that could not even be mentioned even though no edict had swept them from the lexicon, such as "freedom," "justice," and "trade union."
Alba wondered where so many Fascists had come from overnight, because in the country's long democratic history they had not been particularly noticeable, except for a few who got carried away during World War II and thought it amusing to parade in black shirts with their arms raised in salute-- to the laughter and the hissing of bystanders-- and had never won any important role in the life of the country. (pg 426)
But again, this isn't a straightforward political novel, although its description of (specific) world events and their consequences is invaluable. No, this book is about bigger themes and it's no doubt why it's endured and partially why it feels so relevant forty years after it was published. It's about cycle-breakers, but also tradition. It's about family, but also finding (and choosing) your family. It's about the personal as well as the political. It's about what we choose to document and remember and what we choose to forget. It's about seeing and taking the bigger picture of our family story and how we choose to relate that to life itself.
The character of Trueba is complicated, to be sure. And some could accuse Alba's (and thus, the book's) ultimate philosophy at the end of being too pat. After all, it wasn't García himself who was raped, it was his grandmother. And he didn't rape Trueba himself, he raped (and imprisoned and tortured) his granddaughter, Alba. And it had far, far less to do with revenge for his grandmother's plight so much as it did for his own feelings of being denied what he'd been led to believe was rightfully his, wealth and title. But maybe that too is a lesson of the book, that it's not as straightforward as we may believe, it's complicated and often those claiming to act for noble reasons are doing it for their own selfishness.
Will it take you as long as it took me to find the groove of the book, roughly a hundred pages into it? Maybe, maybe not. But all I can do is urge you to stick with it, because the end result is so worth it. One of the greatest feelings in life is experiencing and understanding for yourself why something is considered to be a masterpiece.
Notable:
Okay, this is not only a translation, it's a translation from 1985, so there's bound to be some weird stuff that has not aged well.
The only one whose appearance was enhanced by mourning was the church's patron saint, Sebastián, for during Holy Week the faithful were spared the sight of that body twisted in the most indecent posture, pierced by arrows, and dripping with blood and tears like a suffering homosexual, whose wounds, kept miraculously fresh by Father Restrepo's brush, made Clara tremble with disgust. (pg 2)
"Suffering homosexual"?
She had often discussed this with her suffragette friends, and they had all agreed that until women shortened their dresses and their hair and stopped wearing corsets, it made no difference if they studied medicine or had the right to vote (pg 7)
Not a translation problem nor a problem of the era, as we're still having this issue now. People who fought for women's suffrage are suffragists, "suffragette" was a pejorative term given to them, so don't use it! Use "suffragists" instead.
The enormous dog approached her, laid his huge, millennial animal head in her lap (pg 102)
had been the first to introduce the country to the millennial practice of the martial arts.(pg 143)
They formed a group that was prepared to receive the millennial knowledge Nicolás had acquired in the East. (pgs 330 and 331)
Since obviously this doesn't refer to the generational term (as the translation dates from long before it was coined), "millennial" means "relating to a thousand years" in this instance, so... what does this mean? The thousand year old practice of martial arts? Okay. The thousand year old knowledge from India? Okay. But that first one has me stumped. I don't know, a dog that looks like he's a thousand years old?
At an age most children are still in diapers, Blanca looked like an intelligent midget. (pg 115)
Ooof.
But a word choice that seems to really mean different things within this book is "adolescent". How would you describe "adolescent"? A cursory dictionary search means the period between a child and an adult. It's somewhat purposely nebulous.
That summer he was twenty-one and he was bored in the country. His brother kept close watch to prevent him from giving the girls a hard time, for Jaime had proclaimed himself the protector of the maidenly virtues of Tres Marías; despite this, Nicolás managed to seduce almost all the adolescent girls around, using acts of gallantry never seen before in those parts. (pg 209)
Okay, not sure what age they're using to qualify as "adult" but, uh, here's hoping it's not an insinuation that Nicolás took after his father.
During all those years, Pedro Tercero never got used to the life of bachelor, despite his success with women, especially the magnificent adolescents whom the laments of his guitar inflamed with love. (pg 344)
Or that Tercero is using his massive success as a revolutionary folk singer to help himself to underage girls.
But maybe for this book, "adolescent" could be "late teens", right?
He had seen Alba mature practically overnight, leaving behind the vague shape of adolescence to assume the body of a satisfied and gentle woman. (pg 373)
Or not?
Speaking of ouch,
Alba would have liked her Uncle Jaime to marry her mother, because it was safer to have him as a father than an uncle, but it was explained to her that this sort of incestuous union produced mongoloid offspring.(pg 301)
After the nuns left, their herd of mongoloids in hand and their white wings aflutter, Blanca hugged her daughter passionately, covered her face with kisses, and told her they should thank God that she was normal. For this reason, Alba grew up thinking that normality was a gift from heaven. (pg 312)
Yikes.
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The Indian set off at the slow trot typical of his race (pg 287)
This is when Blanca is describing one of her Count husband's servants and I'm trying to see if this is implying that because it's largely from Trueba's point of view even when he's not directly telling the story this is supposed to indicate his racism, or if it's from Blanca's point of view and meant to indicate hers (less violent and entrenched than her father's, and due to ignorance and privilege and far more likely to be changed with information, but racism none the less).
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They burned the fields, the chicken coops, the bicycles, and even the cradles of newborn babies, in a noontime witches' Sabbath that nearly made Trueba die of joy. (pg 429)
I get the idea and why, but still, calling it a witches' Sabbath made me twitch.
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That same day my grandfather wanted us to leave the country. He was afraid for me. But I explained that I could not leave, because far away from my country I would be like those trees they chop down at Christmastime, those poor rootless pines that last a little while and then die. (pg 470)
That is an absolutely heartbreakingly exquisite line, so incredibly evocative and timeless and perfect. This is part of why this book is a masterpiece.
Final Grade: A
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