ŷ������

I CORRECTED WIKIPEDIA, AND I LIKED IT : A GEEKY MINOR ANECDOTE

Since The House of the Spirits is all about Chile I thought I’d check out some history on Wikipedia. I found a page called Timeline of Chilean History. So I was reading that and I came across this under the year 2006 �� it was a classic WTF moment :

Strange Missile Accident in Chile killing 50,000 citizens as investigators call it just an accident, some think is was planned to hit the oceans of California but went wrong. Sources say that nobody knew about the missile and thats what made it even more dangerous. Unsuspecting people dying at 12:00 P.M exactly.

Oho, I thought, a piece of vandalism if ever I saw one. This insane item was unsourced - because everyone knows there was no strange missile accident in Chile killing 50,000. I think we would all have been somewhat aware of it if there had been. (Vandalism as you probably know is when people with a sense of innocent fun insert wild and crazy untruths into the hallowed pages of the great Wiki. Editors should prowl all ten billion pages of Wikipedia 24/7 and prevent this happening but some things get missed. The more obscure page it is, the longer your ridiculous made up nonsense will stay there.)

I left the strange missile accident there for 24 hours then I came back and deleted it just like that, because anyone can edit Wikipedia.

THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS

And now back to our scheduled programme. This is a very looooonnnnngggggg novel often described as magical realist. Well, there is a charming young proto-hippy called Clara who has telekinetic and clairvoyant powers, she can predict the future, but this happens only sporadically. There was not enough magic for me. If I had a kid like Clara she would have been bundled up and taken to the track every Saturday. “Which horsey is gonna win this race, dear?��

IF I MAY BE SO BOLD

As to complain just a leetle bit about a couple of leetle things, really nothing at all, but in this 500 page 20th century panorama, until the election of Allende, the author only mentions three historical events �� world wars get a vague reference and the moon landing comes up briefly. So most of the time we are rafting lazily in timeless mode. Well, maybe that’s how it was in Chile mostly. But it was like being on holiday with no signal and no newspapers.

And I must say that this book is full of page long paragraphs of explication and descriptive listings of interior decoration, and for long stretches is wholly bereft of dialogue. I could have used a bit more lively dialogue. These are plenty lively characters so let's hear them talk to each other! C'mon!

Then also, I have a dislike of when authors call characters The Candidate or The President or The Poet and decline to give them names. I guess in this case Isabel Allende wanted to be clear that she was referring to Salvador Allende and Pablo Neruda but still, a fictitious name would look better I think.

WHIMSY REPLACED BY TORTURE

This is a book of two halves. Make that four quarters. Maths is not my strong subject. The last 150 pages are a whole other thing. Up to then we get a whimsical family saga about three generations of women coping with the usual crew of misshapen hideous men-beasts, mainly in the form of the nasty padrone of the hacienda Esteban Trueba, whose hobbies were raping peasant girls and screaming at people.

But when Salvador Allende wins the 1970 election everything changes. In the military coup that followed after three years of chaos torture replaces cuteness and we get a gruelling horror story full of despair. This was the great part of the book for me. I noticed that this appalling account of what fascists will do to anyone who looks at them in the wrong way was written only ten years after the actual events. It gave me a chill.

3.5 stars for me (a life-changing 5 stars for many other readers, of course)