Colección Austral La casa de los espíritus

More than twenty-five years have passed by since the publication of The House of the Spirits, written by Isabel Allende (1942), a virtually unknown Chilean who, while living in exile in Caracas, wishing to exorcise the ghosts of the Pinochet dictatorship, put pen to paper in January 1981 and did not stop until she had strung together more than five hundred pages, like an exorcism. Thus began the pilgrimage to the publishers in the area, all of whom rejected it, until it was finally launched successfully in Spain, subsequently rising to fame in Europe and Latin America. During this process of literary reception, it finally arrived in Pinochet's Chile, exploiting the "Allende phenomenon": an immense success of sales, translations into German, Russian, Japanese... as well as the cinematographic version in 1993. The key to this success lies in the extraordinary narrative abilities of Isabel Allende, the inventor of a "human comedy" in the style of Balzac.