Isabel Allende: La casa de los espíritus (The House of the Spirits)

Isabel Allende’s breakout success and still one of my favorite novels by her (surpassed only by Of Love and Shadows): A multigenerational allegory on the story of her native Chile – seen through the eyes of the novel’s female protagonists, the women of the Trueba clan; particularly the paranormally gifted Clara, as well as the Patrón, Don Esteban Trueba (Clara’s husband and the father and grandfather of their daughter Blanca and granddaughter Alba) – and at the same time, Allende’s attempt to come to terms with her own family’s involvement in Chile’s history.  A gorgeously lyrical narrative, as expansive as the plains surrounding the Trueba estate of Tres Marías; at times harsh, at other times, delicate, and a paen to the will to survive and to live exhibited by the Trueba women in the face of all adversity.  Of all books labeled as exponents of magical realism, to me this one, alongside Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, is the quintessential magical realist novel.