(2006), a comparative study of New World Baroque art, architecture and literature, and Writing the Apocalypse (1989) and The Usable Past (1997), both of which examine the nature of historical imagination and its representations in contemporary U.S. and Latin American fiction.
She is co-editor of Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (1995).
At Shepherd she tagged five of the best books from Latin America to capture the magic of magical realism, including:
The House of the Spirits by Isabel AllendeRead about the other entries on the list.
The House of the Spirits tells the story of a family in an unnamed Latin American country over the course of fifty years, starting in the 1920s. We get to know four generations of Del Valle women, each of whom has a mystical side that allows her to commune with spirits and act upon the insights that these spirits provide.
There is also the patriarch of the family, Esteban Trueba, who is quite the opposite of the women in his family—astrongman whose exercise of economic and political power has terrible consequences.
The name of the country where the novel takes place isn’t mentioned, but we know that it is Chile because the plot moves inexorably toward 9/11/1973, the date of the military coup in Chile that led to thousands of “disappeared” or exiled citizens.
The personal and the political are well balanced in this novel because while we are deeply engaged in the lives of the characters, we also watch as a long-standing democracy crumbles and finally falls to a military dictatorship. Allende is herself Chilean and a relative of the President of Chile who was murdered during the military take-over in 1973.
This novel is her first, and it serves as a memoir of her family’s experiences, both political and personal, bitter and sweet.
The House of the Spirits is among Christopher Barzak's five books about magical families and Elif Shafak's five favorite literary mothers.
--Marshal Zeringue
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