Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Chopin performed on the piano by invisible hands, a horse-size dog with crocodile claws who feeds on marmalade, chairs that dance and saltcellars that scamper across the dining table. These are some of the fantastic images in The House of the Spirits, a first novel by Isabel Allende that has captivated readers in Latin America and Western Europe. Published in Spanish in 1982, it quickly became a best seller in Spain and many Latin American countries. Foreign-language versions that appeared last year have sold 400,000 copies in France and kept the book on the best-seller list...
...former journalist, has even scored a success in her native Chile, despite the fact that the present government came to power after the 1973 assassination of her uncle, Marxist President Salvador Allende Gossens. Although the book is sympathetic to the dead leader, Chile's ruling junta has permitted the novel to pass through its stringent censorship...
...this has a familiar ring it is because Allende has self-consciously modeled her novel on Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, a four-generation family chronicle set in a nonexistent town. Allende's Rosa the Beautiful is obviously a stand-in for Garcia Marquez's Remedios the Beauty, famed for her spectacular ascension to heaven with the family laundry. The job-hopping Nicolas in The House of the Spirits doubles for One Hundred Years' mad inventor, Jose Arcadio Buendia, who strives to manufacture the philosophers' stone and photograph...
Allende's most persuasive pages describe the coup that felled her uncle and the terror that followed as it hits all the members of her fictional family, whatever their politics. Hers is an evenhanded account told with much poignancy. Regrettably, however, the novel stumbles to a close when the author falls back upon one of Garcia Marquez's hoariest literary devices: the discovery of an old manuscript that predicts the family's whole history. Though Allende's debut is full of promise, she still needs to break away from the domination of her unwitting mentor before she can fully display...
...same story, as explored last week in a Virginia City courtroom, seemed to belong not in a paperback novel at all but in a casebook of parental pathology. As the younger of the so-called mountain men went on trial in the abduction and wounding of Swenson and the killing of Alan Goldstein, neither of the accused--Dan Nichols, 20, and Don Nichols, 54--disputed the facts. Instead, both testified to an almost grotesque relationship in which the son had been manipulated into a state of worshipful dependency on a father who despised and defied conventional society. Dan's foster...