![]() (The fact that the deposed president and the author share the same last name isn't a coincidence – Isabel is the daughter of Salvador's cousin.) References to world events such as World War I and the moon landing place the action between the 1910s and 1973, the year of the military uprising. And Chapter 13 tells the story of the military coup d'état that General Augusto Pinochet led against Socialist President Salvador Allende, establishing a totalitarian state that would last for fifteen years. From the magnitude of the earthquake described in Chapter 5, we can guess she's referring to the 1939 Chilean earthquake that devastated the country and killed nearly 30,000 people. While Allende never comes out and says it, there are several clues that let us know she's writing about Chile. (For more on the significance of houses in the novel, check out "Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory.") On the macro level, the setting is pretty broad – we're talking about a family saga of epic proportions that touches on questions of national identity and spans more than fifty years. The country estate, on the other hand, is the province of the patriarch, Esteban Trueba, who furnishes the house in heavy, no-nonsense furniture and rules his hacienda with an iron fist. The city house becomes Clara's territory, and she slowly transforms the straightforward colonial rooms into a charmingly chaotic labyrinth of twisting hallways and staircases that lead nowhere. The two settings help illustrate the themes of women and femininity and men and masculinity, which are kind of a big deal in this book. On the micro level, it's the story of a wealthy family who spends most of their time divided between a big colonial-style mansion in the capital and an estate (called a hacienda in Spanish) in the countryside. To understand the setting of The House of the Spirits, it helps to think about the novel on two levels – a micro level and a macro level. A big city house and a country plantation, Chile, twentieth century
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