Customer Reviews
Fantastic - By: DJ Darroch-thompson, 10 Oct 2008 
I have never read a book where so many characters are delved into so deeply. Allende is a wonderful story teller, & the narrative being interspersed with individual character opinions makes it alll the better. I had to limit my reading every day so I would not get through it too quickly. Even if you have no interest in the Chilean revolution, this book is a must read. It's a shame that the rest of her books never quite made it up to this standard.
Clara, Clearest Clairvoyant!! Magical visitations in Isabel Allende's House! - By: J. S. Lewison, 01 Sep 2008 I can still remember reading Allende's opening lines in Liverpool's Bold Street Waterstones. 'Barrabas came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate callligraphy.' I tingled alll over, bought the book & barely managed to get off the train at Bolton Station. Literary purists always gesture knowingly towards their copies of Marquez's One Hundred years of Solitude. Leave them to it. Allende was born to write this book. She centres her story on a family's experience of Pinochet's savage regime in Chile. The House of the Spirits is as the title suggests, a family saga but a saga marvellously suffused by 'other' ways of knowing about events & futures. Part of the magic of the novel is that the 'spirit' co-exists powerfully with the 'material' in an unapologetic & finallly redemptive way. The epigraph by the poet Pablo Neruda says it alll for me:
How much does a man live, after alll?
Does he live a thousand days, or one only?
...What does it mean to say 'for ever'?
Fantastic - By: Kate Mattheys, 01 Aug 2008 I absolutely loved this book! It was colourful & political, about love & family, sadness & tragedy, alll wrapped into one heart-warming story. For me it was one of those books that once I started, I didn't want to do anything else but see what happened next.
Allende has become my favourite author as a result of this book. I would advise anyone to read it.
My first favourite book! - By: Mr. F. Ghillani, 31 Mar 2008 We can alll remember that book that showed us how reading can be genuinely enjoyable. For me, The House of the Spirits was that book. I was to read this book in 11th grade when we were given 2 months to finish it. Back then I had better ways to distract myself from homework by the time I realised it was 2 days before the deadline I had only read about 4 chapters. Of those two days, I forced myself to read as much of it as I could, & the first night I ended up reading just over 100 pages, leaving the remaining 250 pages for the following day. Needless to say, it was not a struggle & I actuallly enjoyed reading the whole thing, even though it took most part of day & night.
Isabelle Allende is Chilean, & very proudly molds her stories around her knowledge of her country & her ancestry. She has extremely powerful ways of describing expressions & feelings in detail, & will write in words what some of us wouldn't be able to describe. Love is one of those, & this book is full of it. Love for the country, love for the family, love for that one special person, & the power it has over you, giving you the strength to accomplish anything.
Like alll memorable novels, The House of the Spirits is a mixture of melancholy, joy, sadness, laughter; an array of powerful feelings that grasp the reader's heart. Tragedy has a continuous presence in this story as it evolves around Chile's civil war & the way the characters lived, or died, through it. Some of the characters used were based on real relatives, adding a biographical touch to the story, enhancing the power of the novel.
A must read, & if you like Isabel Allende, I strongly recommend PAULA, Isabel's autobiography, but be prepared for a very powerful & captivating book.
Magical... - By: J. Julian, 09 Jan 2008 
Reallly magical book that follows a family through four generations. A strange mix of fantasy & reality. Didn't get 5 stars as it took me a long time to get through (not because I'm lazy, just sometimes could only get through a few pages at a time). The authors description of characters is brilliant, I reallly felt like I knew them. Becomes extremely political towards the end (which would usuallly stop me reading) but Allende's writing style & dashes of fantasy throughout kept me going. Strange book but very very good!!
