The House of Spirits (Easton Press Signed Collector's Edition)

ALLENDE, Isabel (trans. Magda Bogin). The House of the Spirits. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2016.

Octavo. Full burgundy leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 368 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special title page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published as La casa de los espíritus, Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 1982. First English translation by Magda Bogin, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.

Isabel Allende (b. 1942) was born in Lima and raised in Chile, the niece of Salvador Allende, the socialist president whose government was overthrown in the military coup of September 1973. She was working as a journalist in Santiago when the coup occurred. She went into exile in Venezuela in 1975. In 1981, learning that her hundred-year-old grandfather was dying in Chile, she began writing him a letter. The letter grew into a novel. She has said she never intended it to be a novel at all.

La casa de los espíritus was rejected by every Spanish-language publisher to whom it was submitted before being accepted by Plaza & Janés in Barcelona, where it appeared in 1982. It became an immediate bestseller, was named the best novel of the year in Chile, and was translated into more than thirty languages. The English translation by Magda Bogin, published by Knopf in 1985, brought Allende to international attention and established her as one of the major writers to emerge from Latin America in the generation after García Márquez and Vargas Llosa.

The novel follows four generations of the Trueba and del Valle families across a century of turbulent history in an unnamed Latin American country whose parallels with Chile are unmistakable. At its centre is the house of the title and the family who inhabit it: Esteban Trueba, the volatile, tyrannical patriarch whose lust for land and control shapes the lives of everyone around him; Clara the Clairvoyant, his wife, who inhabits a world partly beyond the material and whose notebooks form the novel's documentary spine; Blanca, their daughter, whose love for the son of Esteban's foreman generates the central scandal of the middle section; and Alba, Blanca's daughter, who is arrested, tortured, and raped after the military coup that closes the book. The coup was the coup of 1973. The torturers are the torturers who came after it.

The novel belongs to the tradition of magic realism that García Márquez had established with One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Allende acknowledged the debt explicitly; she was initially criticised for it, and the criticism has receded as the distinction of her own achievement has become clearer. The House of the Spirits is not an imitation of anything; it is a novel about history, memory, love, and the transmission of experience across generations, and it uses the supernatural not as ornament but as the only adequate register for events — political terror, familial obsession, the persistence of the dead among the living — that realism alone cannot fully contain. It was adapted into a film in 1993, directed by Bille August, with Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons, Winona Ryder, and Antonio Banderas.

Near fine. A few small marks to gilt upper edge; otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000492