Books: From Chile with Magic the House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

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Esteban's efforts to please Clara prove disastrous. After their wedding he can think of nothing better to present to his bride than the hide of her beloved dead dog Barrabas, turned into a rug and laid out at the foot of the marriage bed. "His two glass eyes stared up at her with the helpless look that is the specialty of taxidermists." Esteban's insensitiveness toward his wife extends beyond the grave. When Clara dies, the inconsolable widower begins wearing a suede pouch hanging under his shirt. "In it were his wife's false teeth, which he treated as a token of good luck and expiation." Indeed, he had knocked out her teeth in a quarrel years earlier.

The behavior of the next generation of Truebas is scarcely more sensible. Nicolas' twin Jaime is famous for literally giving his shirt away at the sight of a needy person. On one occasion he charitably removes his trousers in a public plaza, causing bystanders to cheer. Sister Blanca is regarded as the only normal member of the family because she shows "not the slightest inclination for her mother's spiritualism or her father's fits of rage." Still, she is the first among the clan's women to bed down outside her class.

The antic narrative is carried along by Allende's natural sense of fun until her characters reach the 1970s. At this juncture the Truebas are drawn into the violent confrontations between oligarchs and socialists that have afflicted modern Chile. The author here begins to exercise her skills as a journalist as she evokes the turbulent events she witnessed during the Marxists' electrifying rise and precipitous fall. Not surprisingly, magic subsides and realism takes over. Allende deftly turns her characters into archetypes of Latin America's left and right.

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 her distinctive voice.