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THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS. By Isabel Allende. Translated from the Spanish by Magda Bogin. 368 pages. Knopf. $17.95. WITHIN a couple of dozen pages, Isabel Allende's extraordinary first novel, ''The House of the Spirits,'' found several ways to antagonize this reader.
First, it seems to be an openly ideological novel. Set in an unnamed South American country, it is obviously going to tell the story of Chile's peaceful socialist revolution and violent militaristic counterrevolution -the author being a Chilean now living in Caracas, and, not incidentally, the niece of former President Salvador Allende Gossens. Moreover, it is obviously going to tell Chile's story from a point of view not exactly sympathetic to the present ruling junta. The reader may not be exactly sympathetic to the present ruling junta either, but he doesn't need a novel to lecture him about political repression.
Second, ''The House of the Spirits'' seems guilty of that extravagant and whimsical fabulousness so dear to the imagination of many South and Central American fictionalists. Within the first few dozen pages of ''The House of the Spirits,'' we have a horse-sized dog named Barrabas who likes ham and ''every known type of marmalade,'' an uncle named Marcos who flies off into the clouds with the aid of a mechanical bird he has built, and a clairvoyant child named Clara who decides to become mute upon witnessing her green-haired sister's autopsy. In the land of repression, magic sometimes sounds like hysteria.
But while novels of this length and variety often erode the reader's patience, ''The House of the Spirits'' has the effect of wearing down one's resistance. True, it's full of one-dimensional characters of excessive good or evil, and you can bet that none of the reactionaries are nice. But the Clara, Blanca and Alba Trueba – the mother, daughter and granddaughter who successively preside over the House of the Spirits -are complex and vivid women. And the story's dominant character, the tragically ill-tempered Senator Esteban Trueba, is so appalling and appealing that he easily transcends ideology.
Yes, there are patches of simplistic writing: ''The relationship between'' Clara and Blanca ''underwent no major changes with the girl's development, because it was based on the solid principle of mutual acceptance and the ability to laugh together at almost everything.'' But most of the prose is sharply observant, witty and eloquent. An assessment of the Truebas more typical of the novel's style is Clara's remark to her granddaughter Alba that there are no crazy people in the family because ''here the madness was divided up equally, and there was nothing left over for us to have our own lunatic.''
And certainly, the details of Isabel Allende's story continue throughout to be bizarre and exaggerated. Clara the clairvoyant grows up to be a seer and necromancer who is often observed by her family floating about the house in a chair. She is attended by a devoted sister-in-law who ends up putting a curse on the master of the house, the irascible Esteban Trueba, that causes him gradually to shrink.
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