I just recently finished Isabel Allende’s novel, House of The Spirits and I am still on a high. House of The Spirits is Isabel Allende’s first novel. She wrote it when she and her family were exiled in Venezuela after having fled Chile when a military coup overthrew the government. Allende was a young journalist at the time and her political beliefs were well known, so for her life’s safety, she fled the country. During that time away she found out that her grandfather who she was extremely close to was terminally ill. She decided that she would write a letter to him and one year later that letter had turned into a manuscript. She was thirty-nine when she wrote House of the Spirits and forty when it was published in 1982.

The story unfolds the history of four generations of a family. The book has a little bit of everything in it -family history, love, lust, abuse, magic, drama drama drama, politics and revolution. The book is written in a multi-person narrative which makes all the layers of the book come alive in such a rich way. Throughout the entire journey of the book, after having been so closely connected to the characters for decades , following them them through life and death, the book really ends up being about the personal evolution of Esteban Trueba, the family patriarch and the love that he and his granddaughter Alba shared. Obviously, this conclusion is sooo overly simplified and there is so much life and adventure and heartbreak and love that fills all five-hundred pages; but that is what makes this book so groundbreaking, intense and magical. And knowing that Allende first started this book as a letter to her beloved grandfather, it makes sense.

20/10 recommend this book.

I didn’t realize how much of an impact this book would have on me when I first decided to read it. Reading through each page was like drinking an ice cold glass of water on the hottest day of year. The detailed descriptions of each character, dinner parties, setting, etc. was intoxicating to me, I couldn't get enough. I love how sophisticated and steady Nedra was. How perfect she was at hosting, how she smoked cigars and held a steady, quiet confidence about her, how she found herself in her laters years and didn’t judge herself and gave herself grace for taking so long to make real changes in her life; and how as she grew into the later years of her womanhood, younger women admired and wanted to be around her, spend time with her. I am inspired by her just like those younger women in the book. I am also inspired by James Salter's straightforward style of writing. Simple, dialogue short but profound and the romantic world but devastatingly realistic world that he created in Light Years. I am hungry for more of his work. No wonder why he has been called a "writer's writer". I feel strongly about him the way I feel about Lucia Berlin. Their words bring out a feeling in me that I don't quite know how to describe yet. When I figure it out, I'll circle back.