It’s not often that you read a book as full of symbolism as The House of Spirits. Even its name has symbolism: The house on the corner is built like a normal house and looks like a normal house from the outside, but it has a bunch of crazy impractical additions built onto it based solely on Clara’s whims which serve along with the ever-present spirits to make the house a metaphor for the novel itself. It can be read as a regular run of the mill romance novel, but it actually contains a complex web of foreshadowing and twisting of the plot, which most of the time I was oblivious to(1).
Another unique aspect of this book is that instead of being “linear” it is more circular. The way that it is narrated serves to magnify this. A lot of decisions that are made by characters, especially Esteban Trueaba, have blatant consequences down the road. For example, because of his exploitation of the female peasants, his granddaughter is kidnapped. But because of his generosity in loaning money to Transito, his granddaughter is rescued. Stuff like this seems to happen throughout the book, and there are probably numerous instances where it went right over my head and I didn’t even notice it. At the end of the book Esteban Trueaba begins to become aware of how his actions and attitudes have impacted his life. When he “sowed” violence, meanness and anger (which was quite often) he “reaped” bitterness and loneliness, and when he did something nice (which seemed very seldom) he got blessed for it. You would think that he would have put two and two together a lot earlier, but that wouldn’t have served the authors purpose of making males out to be predominately violent, easy to anger, and somewhat dull-witted…
1. SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on The House of the Spirits.”
SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2002. Web. 13 Apr. 2011.
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