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The House of the Spirits; Rosa the Beautiful

#101: Nov. - Dec. 2011 (Fiction)
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Robert Tulip

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Re: The House of the Spirits; Rosa the Beautiful

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Barrabas the dog is also a thief
So we find that the characters are parables. Rosa the Beautiful is like a parable for Chile, a beautiful country that was surreptitiously poisoned by a military coup. Rosa's autopsy reminds me of The National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation Report although this happened after The House of the Spirits was written.

I mentioned earlier that the Gospels are within the genre of magical realism. So I don't believe that Barrabas was a real person.
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Re: The House of the Spirits; Rosa the Beautiful

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I'm having trouble seeing Rosa and Esteban as a tragic love affair. I find Rosa quite vacuous, beautiful but with no substance. She certainly doesn't seem to have any love for Esteban - it's as though she really has no thoughts or feelings of her own at all. And Esteban's professed "love" seems like little more than a desire to possess something beautiful - certainly it doesn't seem as though there is any real love for Rosa the person. I can't seem to empathize with either of these characters - is it just me?
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Re: The House of the Spirits; Rosa the Beautiful

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I think you're right kelstan. Esteban lusts after Rosa, but that's not really love. 'Damn her! she slipped through my hands!' Esteban says after Rosa dies. I've almost finished the book now, and to be honest, I do empathise with Esteban in the later chapters.
Robert - I don't think it matters whether Barrabas was a real person or not. It's interesting to know what part of the myth Allende chose to portray. Somehow I thought it was important, because his is the very first word uttered in the book.
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Robert Tulip

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Re: The House of the Spirits; Rosa the Beautiful

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Esteban Trueba is hard to empathize with given his extreme right wing politics and atrocious behavior. He ends up the loneliest man in the world. His attitude to Rosa is pure infatuated stalking. He holds the idea of perfect Rosa for ever in his mind as his One True Love. No one loves Esteban, because he destroys all his relationships through his focus on power and wealth, his furious temper and violence, his blank remorseless insensitivity to how others see him, and his contemptuous desire to use and control people for his own selfish ends. He prefers to be feared.

The parable of the stalking of Rosa is like the conservative old style rulers of Chile had a romantic dream of the natural beauty of the country, but they did not allow that dream to be affected by evidence and observation, preferring to keep their imagination unsullied by reality so they could justify to themselves their traditions of oligarchic control. The oligarchs are still people though, and need a sense of aesthetic redemption, which they obtain through the myth of the pure virginal beauty of the motherland. Like belief in the Blessed Virgin Mary, conservatives ignore real beauty and instead displace their attention into an imagined alien myth which they worship in order to avoid engagement with reality. This attitude stores up a tectonic separation between fantasy and reality. Only reality can win in the end, albeit after major upheaval and conflict.

Just like the infant Clara telling the church we are fucked if the stories about hell are lies, the death of Rosa from strychnine poisoning introduces a jarring note. People seek to create a beautiful dream, regardless of reality, but reality intrudes to point out that the dream is self-serving.
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Re: The House of the Spirits; Rosa the Beautiful

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The problem is, I could not read the book as a parable, because I simply did not know enough about the coup in Chile, and for a while was not even sure that it was set in Chile. (Peru is mentioned in one of the first chapters) So I read it as a work of fiction, and to be honest, this made the culminating chapters even more horrific. I was as shocked as the characters in the book that these events could actually have taken place. Perhaps someone could recommend a good historical account of the Chilean coup? Perhaps we could discuss it as a non fiction book?
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Re: The House of the Spirits; Rosa the Beautiful

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Hi guys :)

So finally decided to join the discussion as well.
The book did draw me in since I opened it, I could tell it will be a good read right away! The changes in the perspective of narration don't bother me since they seem synchronize somehow and not as detached as in some other books.

I am very intrigued by all your comments but aren't you guys reading a bit too much into some irrelevant details? Let's keep in mind that Allende does not give a particular name of a country where the action is set in the whole novel. And we do know that Chile was not the only South American country with a dictator in charge so I don't see a reason to focus particularity on Chile. In my eyes it's a story of a clash in between the old Indian America and what came later...

I found the scene when Clara told the priest off so hilarious! The disharmony in between the formal setting and the passion of the priest and an honest, straightforward observation of a child was great.

When it comes to Rosa's and Esteban's relationship - it did feel a bit off. It's not that she didn't love him, she was simply immersed in her own world. And he was allured by her beauty and the aura of mysticism surrounding her. I found it endearing that the guy was willing to sacrifice for Rosa and work hard to accommodate enough wealth to set up a life together at a decent level. The numerous letters he wrote are a proof it was not just pure lust.
"From childhood's hour I have not been as others were
I have not seen as others saw
I could not bring my passions from a common spring
From the same source I have not taken my sorrow
I could not awake my heart to joy at the same tone
And all I loved - I loved alone"

E.A.Poe
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Robert Tulip

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Re: The House of the Spirits; Rosa the Beautiful

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On the very first page, Allende gives us some important clues.

Of Barrabas, she says "Barrabas arrived on a Holy Thursday. He was in a despicable cage, caked with his own excrement and urine, and had the lost look of a hapless, utterly defenseless prisoner; but the regal carriage of his head and the size of his frame bespoke the legendary giant he would become. It was a bland autumnal day that gave no hint of the events that the child would record."

The original Barrabas, the thief set to be crucified with Christ, also arrived on a Holy Thursday, the day before the crucifixion. This description could be of him as much as of the dog. The real clue here regarding location is that Holy Thursday is in autumn. This indicates that the country is in the southern temperate region of South America, where Easter is in autumn. Only Chile, Argentina and Uruguay have anything approaching an autumn season.

This allegory of Barrabas is then extended into a subtle and deep attack on the Roman Catholic Church.

The identity of Chile is later hinted on page 23, where it says the soldiers had learned the goosestep from the Prussians. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goose_step#Spread it seems the Chilean army introduced the goosestep to Latin America after learning it from the Prussians, and other countries learned it from Chile.

I want to talk more about Uncle Marcos and his magic books.
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Re: The House of the Spirits; Rosa the Beautiful

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The epigraph also suggests the setting is in Chile. Pablo Neruda is a well known Chilean poet.

It is common knowledge in the literature world that the novel is a roman a' clef. Allende's cousin was the Chilean President untill military coup in 1973. Neruda was also a candidate for the 1970 presidency against Allende, but withdrew to support Salvadore Allende's campaign.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. — Edward Gibbon
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Re: The House of the Spirits; Rosa the Beautiful

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The poem by Pablo Neruda at the start of the book does indeed indicate that The House of the Spirits is in Chilé. Neruda is Chilé’s national poet, and writes with brilliant luminosity and depth and sadness. He appears later in the book as The Poet. Yet we find the strange device that never once is the name of Chilé mentioned. I also found myself wondering if perhaps the book might be about Allende’s homeland Peru. Yet I suspect The House of the Spirits will come to be regarded as Chilé’s national book, much as The Brothers Karamazov is the national book of Russia, articulating the contrary currents of national identity, even though Allende was born abroad and has lived around the world.

Rosa’s mermaid status is another puzzling mystery. On page 41, as Rosa lays like Sleeping Beauty dead on the slab, her father, Severo del Valle, who had himself accidentally given her the rat poison intended for him, sees her. “Severo was overcome when his daughter’s nightgown was lifted to reveal the splendid body of a mermaid.” And then on the next page, “they recalled the happy days when Rosa scampered in the garden startling the butterflies with her beauty that could have only come from the bottom of the sea.”

These strange statements, presented as fact, illustrate the dream-like magical realism of The House of the Spirits. If you only read it once, you might be forgiven for forgetting the statements that indicate that Rosa is not in fact a mermaid. After all, mermaids are akin to shape-shifters, creatures with a dual identity. Like the nation of Chilé itself, Rosa has both a magical and a prosaic nature. And like Chilé, Rosa is accidentally killed, so to speak, by a loving father. Perhaps at death she reverts to her true identity?

Esteban Trueba, Rosa’s fiancé, is the lead character of the book. His intense conservatism is presented in sympathetic light by Allende, very surprising given the book’s rather left wing theme. His love of Chilé will lead him to campaign for the fascist coup, an event that plunges the nation into destruction and sorrow, the death of Rosa writ large. Throughout the book we find portents of this tragedy. In this chapter, we see mention that Uncle Marcos’s books will be destroyed.

Marcos is an intriguing bit part. He stands for entrepreneurial imagination, with his madcap plan to fly over the Andes on a mechanical bird (p24), and his naïve assumption that “no woman in her right mind could remain impassive before a barrel-organ serenade” (p22). This deadpan statement is typical of Allende’s humor, recalling the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance. In fact, there are many women who would fail to be wooed by military marches and waltzes (one of each repeated) played on a rusty box adorned by a fake ship’s smokestack, to the accompaniment of a shrieking Amazon parrot who had learned Spanish as a second tongue.

The relationship between Marcos and Clara is grounded in his magical books which become the foundation of Clara’s education. She recalls his pose triumphant over a dead Malay tiger as very similar to the Blessed Virgin in her conquest of the devil. His crystal ball and clairvoyant fortune telling introduce Clara to the world of magic. His “collection of maps and books of stories and fairy tales … were hauled out to inhabit the dreams of his descendants, until they were mistakenly burned half a century later on an infamous pyre.” (p29)
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Fri Nov 18, 2011 6:00 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: The House of the Spirits; Rosa the Beautiful

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Yes I loved the character of Uncle Marcos. Totally zany, and also continues with the theme of the sea with his 'pirate's mustache' and 'strange sharklike smile' He also dies on his homeward journey on board ship.
I thought Allende was Chilean? I was reading that her father was the Chilean ambassador to Peru when she was a child, and that after the coup she was put on the 'wanted' list and had to escape Chile for Venezuela.
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