‘The world is not divided between the good and the bad. We are all a little of both’.
We are thrilled to share an exclusive interview with Isabel Allende, in which the legendary author takes us behind the scenes of her novel The House of the Spirits, featured on The Queen’s Reading Room Book Club.
Isabel Allende was born in Lima, Peru, in 1942 and is often considered the most widely read Spanish language author in the world. She has published over twenty works of fiction and memoir, with more than 77 million copies sold worldwide. Although she spent much of her childhood in Chile, Allende moved a lot and stabilised herself through a deep immersion in books and stories. Raised in a world without television, she grew up listening to her grandfather’s wonderful tales – stories that nurtured her imagination and quietly shaped her future as a writer.
After the 1973 coup in Chile, Isabel Allende became involved in helping secure safe passage for individuals in trouble, a role she continued until she began receiving death threats and was forced into exile. She fled to Venezuela, where she lived for 13 years. This was a period that would profoundly shape both her writing and her political life.
In 1977 Allende heard that her beloved grandfather was dying and so to try and contain her emotions, she sat down to write him a letter. This letter turned into hundreds of pages. Once Allende accepted that this letter was, in fact, a novel, she sent it to publishers, most of whom rejected it. Eventually The House of the Spirits found a publisher in Barcelona. It was an instant hit.
In the novel, Allende intertwines the story of the Trueba family with the political history of a nation, creating a world where the spiritual and the everyday coexist, and where memory itself becomes a central character. Often drawing inspiration from her own family history, Allende transforms these experiences so completely that they become fictional worlds rather than direct portraits, and while readers can sense echoes of real people in her work, they have been thoroughly reshaped and turned into symbolic characters. Even the country of Chile is never mentioned explicitly by name. Instead, Allende prefers to keep the setting of her novel vague, and this strategy allows her to explore personal and political ideas more freely, without being bound to strict autobiography. Nevertheless, her writing has not always been welcomed by more traditional or deeply Catholic members of her family, some of whom have taken issue with how she reimagines their history.
You began writing ‘The House of Spirits’ as a letter to your grandfather who was at the end of his life. At what point did it transform into a full story, and what made you realise it needed to become a novel rather than remain something private?
I wrote that book 44 years ago and frankly, I don’t remember the process very clearly. I started writing in an impulse and after a few pages I realized it was not exactly a letter and probably my grandfather would not receive it in time – he was dying – but I kept on writing. I had no idea what it was or what it would become, I just needed to put down my memories, recover all that I lost in exile, give some order to the confusion of my life and meaning to the emptiness I felt. I suppose I realized it might be a novel around pg. 100.
How much of your own family history shapes the world and characters of the book?
Most of the characters are inspired by my extravagant relatives. With a family like mine, I don’t need to invent much. Sometimes I used two people to create a character; I changed all the names; the stories have been exaggerated or changed… yet some people in my family – the most conservative who supported the dictatorship and the most Catholic – got mad at me.
How did you balance research and lived experience when depicting both historical events and everyday life?
The events seem “historical” now, more that 50 years after the military coup and the dictatorship in Chile, but when I wrote the book it was happening. I didn’t need to research much, I had experienced those events, I remembered the details.
The unnamed country in the novel closely resembles Chile. What led you to fictionalise the setting rather than name it directly?
If I had mentioned the country, the facts – historical, geographical, socially, etc. – had to be accurate. That was very limiting. At the time most of Latin America was experiencing dictatorship, repression, assassinations, kidnapping and disappearance of prisoners. The political and social circumstances were similar. I created a generic country that could be any country in Latin America.
Why did you choose to tell such a politically grounded story through elements of magical realism, and what freedoms did that give you?
I told the story as I had experienced it. I was brought up in my grandparents’ house where my clairvoyant grandmother held weekly seances to invoke the souls of the dead. I grew up with the idea that the world is a very mysterious place, everything is possible, there are many dimensions of reality, and we have only five limited senses to perceive and understand those infinite dimensions. I am not religious or superstitious, but I try to live my life with an open mind, with imagination and why not? A sense of humour. I want a magical world for my characters and for myself.
Many of your characters feel deeply symbolic as well as realistic. Did you conceive figures like Esteban Trueba and Clara del Valle as individuals first, or as representations of broader ideas such as power and spirituality?
I based those characters in my grandparents. I did not have to invent Clara, my grandmother was just like her. My grandfather had Esteban’s character: authoritarian, conservative, hardworking, ambitious, but he was not a villain, he was the most decent man on Earth, generous and kind. I am glad that he died before he had a chance to read the book: it would have killed him and I would have his death on my conscience.
Esteban Trueba is both deeply flawed and, at times, sympathetic. How did you approach writing a character capable of both cruelty and vulnerability without simplifying him?
Esteban Trueba had a life of its own. At the beginning, when he is young, he resembled my grandfather, but when he becomes a landlord, a senator, a rich and greedy man, he changed. In a way, he betrayed me. It was not my intention to make him a villain. He just misbehaved. In the novel he lives a very long life and has enough time to see the consequences of his actions and pay the price of his multiple sins. In the last chapters, when he has lost everything, I felt compassion and love for him.
The house itself feels almost like a character. How did you develop it as a symbolic place that reflects the family’s emotional and political changes?
When I wrote my first novel I was not a writer, I knew nothing about literature or about the book industry. I just wanted to tell a story. I was not thinking about archetypes, symbols, structure, or any of the many aspects that critics and professors find in a text. To me the house was important because originally it represented Esteban’s ambition and desire to transcend, but Clara transformed half of it into an enchanted realm.
Looking back, what does ‘The House of the Spirits’ mean to you personally now, and has its meaning changed over time?
In l981, when I wrote the novel, I was almost 40 years old and felt that I had done nothing worth mentioning, that I had no purpose, no future. The book changed my life. Writing gave a voice, it connected me to millions of people all over the world, it paved the way for all the other books that I have written. In time, it has become a classic. It is still in print in 42 languages, it has inspired other creators to make film, theatre, TV, etc. It is studied and celebrated. It doesn’t belong to me anymore… Well, maybe it never did. Once a book is published, it belongs to the readers.
Did you anticipate the novel’s international success, and how did that success affect you both personally and professionally?
Nobody anticipated the success of ‘The House of the Spirits’. It was rejected by a few publishing houses before an agent got hold of it in Spain. I was a completely unknown new writer (and to make matters worse, a woman). The book was too long and messy. Why did it hit the mark? That’s a mystery that surprises me to this day.
