Isabel Allende,Magda Bogin, The House of the Spirits

Isabel Allende,Magda Bogin, The House of the Spirits:

I can still remember reading Allende's opening lines in Liverpool's Bold Street Waterstones. 'Barrabas came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy.' I tingled all over, bought the book and barely managed to get off the train at Bolton Station. Literary purists always gesture knowingly towards their copies of Marquez's One Hundred years of Solitude. Leave them to it. Allende was born to write this book. She centres her story on a family's experience of Pinochet's savage regime in Chile. The House of the Spirits is as the title suggests, a family saga but a saga marvellously suffused by 'other' ways of knowing about events and futures. Part of the magic of the novel is that the 'spirit' co-exists powerfully with the 'material' in an unapologetic and finally redemptive way. The epigraph by the poet Pablo Neruda says it all for me:

How much does a man live, after all?

Does he live a thousand days, or one only?

...What does it mean to say 'for ever'?