Isabel Allende: “The House of the Spirits has changed my life. I was in exile, I found my center forever”

We are publishing, courtesy of the publisher Feltrinelli, the preface that Isabel Allende wrote for the new edition of La casa degli spiriti, which will be released tomorrow 40 years after its first publication.

My dear readers,

how fast life goes by! This year The house of spirits he’s turning forty and I’m turning eighty. Where have the hours gone? Many things have happened in the world and in my life since my novel saw the light, but for me time has flown by, and now here I am at the last stage of my existence without realizing it.

I remember every detail of that day forty years ago when I first picked up my novel. My beloved stepfather, the incomparable Uncle Ramón, had asked a friend in Madrid to send him a copy of the freshly printed book to Caracas. He invited me to dinner and, when it was time for dessert, he handed me a paper bag, one of those from the market, and told me to take a look at the contents when I had time. The moment I opened it and saw what was inside, a scream rose from the depths of the earth and went through my whole body. Wonderful! Since then I have written about twenty books, but I have never again felt anything like that extraordinary emotion, which can only be compared with those felt at the birth of each of my children.

The road this novel has traveled has been straight, smooth, and bright. It is a book that has had a lot of success. The eccentric members of the Trueba and Del Valle families are still walking it, speaking many different languages ​​and always reaching new distant countries with their load of passions and dramas. They’ve been to the movies, starring Meryl Streep, Glenn Close and Jeremy Irons, which look nothing like them, and they’re so much better looking than the originals. I have seen them perform in the theatre, dance ballets, sing classical music and transform themselves into puppets; they will soon appear in a television miniseries. They are tireless. Some of them have appeared in my other books, such as Violeta, who in the end was the granddaughter of Clara, the matriarch of the Spirit houseand Severo del Valle, who married his cousin Nivea in Sepia portrait and had a host of children, including Rosa, the beautiful, and Clara, the seer. Severo had lost a leg in the war, I don’t know how a spare one appeared in his Spirit house. Magic realism?

Looking back on the past, I realize that for me that unforgettable day represented one of those crossroads capable of turning destiny around: I was dragging my feet along the banal path imposed by the circumstances of exile, when a generous muse arrives to offer me the gift of inspiration, which materialized in that uncle Ramón’s paper bag. I didn’t know it then, but now it’s clear to me that that book had the effect of a tornado for me: it lifted me into the air, shook me to the core, snatched me from a mediocre existence and launched me towards an open horizon of infinite possibility. In the forty years since then I have lived through loss and heartache and bereavement, I have changed countries and husbands, and I have also amassed much success, which usually confuses people; but nothing made me lose my center, because writing is my compass. Everything that makes me suffer ends up turning into the alchemy of literature.

I send you a big hug from the attic in California where I continue to write with the same enthusiasm with which I wrote The house of spirits forty years ago.