A house divided

Few literary works impressed me more than Isabelle Allende’s The House of the Spirits inspired by events in the author's home country not least the overthrow from power of her uncle in 1973. The imagery of Chile acquired a universal meaning inspiring generations of authors around the world. The novel is often compared to Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The obvious similarities are that both novels relate the saga of a family, both make liberal use of magic and fantasy, and both established their authors’ literary reputations. But where García Márquez’s words create a poetic picture of Latin-American life, Allende’s words offers an explicit commentary on the political situation in Chile. On the surface, Allende’s novel is the story of Esteban Trueba, his wife, his children, and his granddaughter. But The House of the Spirits is also the story of political corruption, patriarchal authority, feminine oppression, and the movement from the old world into the new. The action in the novel spans four generations and covers more than fifty years of history. During those fifty years, the country changes, first through technology and modern communications, and later through the desire to find a better life. Twenty years after it first appeared in English, the novel is being published again with an introduction by Christopher Hitchens. An extract of Hitchens's intro is reproduced today on the Guardian:

It is while speaking of the island of Crete, in Saki's story "The Jesting of Arlington Stringham", that the eponymous character says that the place "produces more history than it can consume locally". We all know of certain distinctive countries on the map of which this seems to be true. For some reason, a lot of them also begin with the letter C: Czechoslovakia (which now exists only in memory), Cuba, Cyprus - and Chile. And there is also a literary surplus that often comes with these territories: think only of Kafka, Kundera, Yglesias and Neruda.

For people of a certain generation (my own, to be exact: those of us sometimes vulgarly described as the baby-boomers), the imagery and cosmology of Chile is a part of ourselves. A country shaped like a long, thin, jagged blade, forming the littoral of almost an entire continent, and poised to crumble into the ocean leaving only the Andes behind. A place of earthquakes and wine and poets, like some Antarctic Aegean. And a place of arms: the scene of the grand 20th-century confrontation between Allende and Pinochet..

The romance between the rich man's daughter and the penniless son of the peasant is such a folkloric cliché that one has to become wary for an instant, even with an author who has already won one's trust. However, The House Of The Spirits depends for its ingenuity on the blending of the microcosmic with the macrocosmic: the little society of the family and the wider society of Chile..

Nonetheless, there was a point at which family and honour and politics converged, in a kind of redemption of all the wreckage and intolerance. The leaders of the French revolution, with the exception of Lafayette, went to the bad and consumed each other as well as many rivals. The leaders of the Russian revolution - with the arguable exception of Leon Trotsky - went the same way. There are numerous other examples of Jacobin and Bolshevik cannibalism and fratricide, or the analogues of same. The Cuban revolution, even as I write, is expiring in banana-republic futility. But Salvador Allende never murdered or tortured anyone, and faced his own death with unexampled fortitude, and that has made all the difference.

When I first met Isabel Allende, at the point that this novel was first published, she ended our conversation by recalling her uncle's last words, spoken over a hissing and howling static from an improvised radio station, as the western-supplied warplanes were wheeling and diving over the dignified old presidential palace of La Moneda: named for its former office as the Chilean mint. Here is what he said, as cited word-for-word in The House of the Spirits:

''I speak to all those who will be persecuted to tell you that I am not going to resign: I will repay the people's loyalty with my life. I will always be with you. I have faith in our nation and its destiny. Other men will prevail, and soon the great avenues will be open again, where free men will walk, to build a better society.''