Word: trueba
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...stylistic forbears through imitation. As has been noted by several reviewers, a few characters in The House of The Spirits bear more than passing resemblance to creations of Marquez. Rosa the Beautiful, the daughter of Senator del Valle who dies before her marriage to poor but proud Esteban Trueba, is a stand-in for Remedios Buendia of One Hundred Years of Solitude. And Allende's description of the huge Trueba mansion in decay reads like a passage from The Autumn of the Patriarch...
Allende presents the coup from different angles, the most affecting of which is that of Esteban Trueba, the landed patriarch and protagonist Trueba's lifetime spans the years between the turn of the century and the coup's bloody aftermath. First a penniless gold miner, then a landowner struggling for prosperity, he finally becomes a wealthy leader of the nation's conservative political factions...
...even Trueba's stalwart anti-communism does not prevent his rapid disenchantment with the tyranny and bloodshed which follows the accession of the military leaders. In one of the book's most touching scenes he helps his granddaughter's lover, a high official in the administration of the deposed socialist President, escape sure death by smuggling him into a foreign embassy in the trunk of his chauffeured Mercedes...
...book's final pages, in her decision of the coup and the dislocation which followed it, that Allende steps out of the shadow of Marques and other South American novelists. As she describes the unification of the Trueba family, split by political differences but unified by their faith in democracy and their abhorrence of torture, her writing glows with is real eloquence...
Allende is not just an epigone of Garcia Marquez. Writing in the tradition of Latin America's magic realists, she has a singular talent for producing full- scale representational portraits with comic surreal touches. Her rendering of the Trueba patriarch Esteban and his wife Clara is a hilarious display of mismatching. While the crude, commonsensical Esteban is doomed by nature to cause constant offense to his wife, Clara the Clairvoyant irritates her spouse by her perpetual whispered concourse with the spirits...