I wanted to like this, but found myself liking the book less and less as I turned the pages. It may just be that Magical Realism isn't a technique that resonates with me--though I hope it's just Allende's use of it I don't like, and I'm determined to try Borges, García Márquez, and Vargas Llosa someday. I did enjoy Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate, which used this technique, although it's no favorite. But there at least the fantasy elements were woven smoothly throughout and it was apt in a book very much constructed as a fairy tale, complete with three sisters. The fantastic whimsy in House of the Spirits, which opens in the beginning of the 20th Century in Chile, feels more out of place.
This is a story where "The Beautiful Rosa" of the first chapter was born with green hair and yellow eyes, where her sister Clara was a clairvoyant who made true prophesies and moved objects with her mind and their Uncle Mario constructed from a kit a flapping mechanical bird in which he flew away. But it's also a novel where Clara's future husband Esteban Trueba raped and impregnated just abut every young teen peasant girl in the area, had killed any peasant that opposed him, and where his granddaughter Alba endures rape and torture. I don't know enough to know if the mixture of the horrifying and the whimsical is typical in magical realism, but I do know the light-hearted and dark in the novel didn't for me blend well. It doesn't help that the repellant Esteban is the closest thing to a protagonist in the book, the character that connects every character to each other, and the story that is mostly told in a third person/omniscient perspective is frequently punctuated by his (singularly unreliable) first person narrative. Beyond that, I admit I found the socialist polemic obvious in this book distasteful.
