Fourth "Spirit" blog in a Row...

In some of my earlier blogs, I said that Estabon Trueba never felt any remorse for the things that he did. After looking at chapter six I have to retract that statement and insert this one: He begins to feel regret for his past outburst, but this guilt doesn’t seem to stop him from making even more bad decisions and having more fits of uncontrollable anger.

Chapter seven is called Revenge. The most obvious revenge that takes place in this chapter is Trueba trying to catch Pedro Segundo Tercero. Ironically, Trueba is ticked off that Tercero and Blanca have been messing around. Clara exposes this irony by telling Trueba that the only difference between what Pedro Tercero and Blanca are doing and what he himself did was that Pedro Tercero and Blanca love each other. Trueba responds to this by flying into one of his fits of anger and beating his wife. He is almost immediately sorry for his actions, but Clara never talks to him again.

Trueba still tries to kill Tercero even though his daughter loves him. This is the most outright form of revenge in this chapter, but this is also the chapter where we start to see revenge coming upon Trueba. He is extremely distraught that Clara won’t talk to him and he suffers quite a bit. Also, when Trueba finally catches Tercero, with the help of Estabon Garcia, he finds that the revenge that he wanted so badly was not nearly as simple or satisfying as he thought it would be.  Another source of revenge in this chapter is Garcia. He holds a huge grudge against Trueba which is intensified when Trueba calls him a traitor and refuses to give him the reward for finding Tercero. Garcia’s character has been filled with foreshadowing  ever since Trueba first raped Pancha. Because of the cyclical nature of the book, it seems pretty evident that Trueba is going to pay for the violence and evil that he showed to the peasants.

Trueba the Terrible

I find it very hard to enjoy anything about the “House of the Spirits”. I guess this isn’t totally a bad thing because I don’t believe this book was meant to convey warm cozy feelings to the readers. One of the biggest things that frustrated me is the class system and its affects on the un-named country in the book. The book is partly told from Estaban Trueaba’s viewpoint and therefore it makes it kind of hard for him to be the villain. On the other hand, Estaban Garcia is portrayed as evil clear through even though he didn’t really do anything more than Trueba did. It seems crazy that Trueba would be able to narrate the book like he did after seeing the evil that his actions spawned. I believe Trueba is the main villain in the book and the fact that he seems to be ignorant of evilness only makes me dislike him more. He is so conceited and full of himself that he is able to justify all of his evil deeds by paying money or writing off the victims of his deeds as meaningless peasants. It is frustrating that he didn’t seem to think anything was wrong with what he did. At the end of the day, though, this is just a book. It’s easy to point fingers at others and tell them their problems, but sometimes it isn’t as easy to see our own. I guess Trueba’s issues are overly transparent and somewhat easy to point out, but I think a valuable lesson can be learned from his life. Sometimes when I make mistakes or my attitude isn’t right I find myself making excuses and trying to justify my behavior as being alright. I have to make sure that I exceed the standards that I set for other people, or else risk being conceited and deceived like Trueba… So even though the book itself is a drag, it made me think of some way to try improving my life. Therefore I can’t call this book a total epic failure…

Clara the Self Sufficient

In retrospect, it probably would have been wise to do my four blogs before the end of the semester, because now I am stuck doing my blogs on the “House of the Spirits”. I am not going to come right out and say the book was bad, but I will say that it is kind of hard to write four blogs on it.

For the topic of this blog I would like to talk about Clara and how she was able to live with a moral cripple like Estabon. Obviously this couldn’t have been an easy thing to do, but I think the fact that she knew what he was like before she even married him made it a little easier on her than if she suddenly found out what he was like three years into their marriage. Because of her clairvoyance she knew what he was like but also knew it was her destiny to marry him. Since it was her own choice to go through with the marriage, knowing all along that he was a weirdo, self-pity wasn’t really an option for her.  Also, because she never loved him, I think it was easier for her to cope with the fact that he was a dirt-bag.

Throughout her life Clara is always very independent. She doesn’t have to radically break any traditions of the time to be an extremely self sufficient person. When I say self-sufficient I mean as far as her emotional and psychological person. She never really seems to need anything from anybody, unless it is help doing remedial chores around the house… or retrieving her mother’s dismembered head from a bush…