Isabel Allende (1942-)
Isabel Allende was born in Lima, Perú, on August 2, in a family of diplomats and politicians. Her father, Tomás was a Chilean diplomat and her cousin Salvador Allende was the president of Chile from 1970 to 1973. Isabel grew up in Europe, the Middle East and Bolivia where her step-father was a diplomat. The family member that influenced Isabel the most was as in the case of García Márquez,—her grandmother, Isabel Barros Moreira. Isabel, in her web page refers to her as s "my clairyoyant grandmother. She died when I was very young, but her spirit has always accompanied me." (10)
Isabel returned to Chile as a result of the Suez Canal crisis in 1958 to finish her secondary studies. She went to a number of private schools both in Lebanon and Chile and was really well read. It was in Santiago where she met Manuel Frías, her future husband whom she married in 1962. Her first job was for FAO (the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization). In 1964-1965 she traveled around Europe and lived in Brussels and Switzerland with her husband and her one-year old daughter Paula. Her son Nicolás was born upon their return to Chile in 1966.
After divorcing her first husband in 1962, Isabel married an American lawyer named William Gordon in 1988. Like many Latin American writers, she became a journalist and worked for a woman's magazine named Paula, where she published a humorous column named "Impertinentes" ("The Impertinents") that she also edited, and later on briefly directed a children magazine called Mampato.
In 1970 Salvador Allende was elected first socialist president of Chile and the author's stepfather, Ramón Huidobro was appointed ambassador to Argentina. General Augusto Pinochet seized control of Chile in a military coup d'êtat in September of 1973 in which Salvador Allende died; many people thought he was assassinated. This changed Isabel's life:
because my work as a journalist I knew exactly what was happening in my country, I lived through it, and the dead, the tortured, the widows and orphans, left and unforgettable impression on my memory. The last chapters of La casa de los espíritus narrate those events. They are based on what I saw and on the direct testimonies of those who lived through the brutal experience of the repression. (11)
Two years later, Allende and her family moved to Caracas, Venezuela, where she contributed to El Nacional, a newspaper and where she worked as a teacher. They lived there for thirteen years. It was then when she begun La casa de los espíritus. The manuscript was initially a letter to her grandfather, who still lived in Chile and soon after died, but the material from the letter was incorporated to the book. The House of the Spirits was published in 1982.
La Casa de los Espíritus
The novel
La casa de los espíritus is a family saga of the del Valle-Trueba family with the history of Chile and its politics as background. The novel covers from the turn of the century until the military coup that led General Pinochet to power. It was a best seller in Europe and Latin America, winning awards such as the Grand Prix d'Evasion in France, the Point de Mire in Belgium or the Panorama Literario Award in Chile.
As some scholars have pointed out, La casa de los espíritus was shaped in the magic realism configuration although Allende belonged to a later generation. The novel was built around a mixture of reality and fantasy, mingling the living and spirits, and characters having unusual attributes: Clara can predict the future, play the piano with its cover closed, communicate with the spirits, Alba's green hair, etc. The novel presents two levels that are intertwined, one introduces the tragic political history of Chile and the other shows a fantastic and supernatural universe with characters with supernatural physical and spiritual attributes.
The Film
The adaptation was written and directed by Bille August, a well known Danish filmmaker for the high quality of his works. He is one of the few directors to win Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or twice. He is also renowned for adapting seemingly difficult novels into successful features. His eye for characters and historical periods, has gained him a solid reputation as one of the most talented filmmakers of his generation.
The House of the Spirits despite its unique cast including Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Jeremy Irons, Antonio Banderas, Vanessa Redgrave and Winona Ryder, is not one of his finest works, due in part to the richness of detail and difficulty of the original text. The film is neither as politically charged as Allende's novel nor retains the flavor of her setting, which at times seems quite European. Other differences include the compression or loss of main characters: August, who wrote the screenplay, decided to blend Clara and Esteban's daughter and granddaughter, in Blanca (Winona Ryder in the screen). Blanca's two brothers do not exist in the adaptation, as the green hair or the "dog-rug."
For the unit, we will use only fragments of the film, since it contains several sexual situations, brief nudity and graphic and disturbing violence.
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