It was a book written in anger, now a TV series has captured its rage – and heart

When Isabel Allende wrote The House of the Spirits, she was moved by volcanic anger. Anger with the patriarchy, anger at the vast class divide in her native Chile that left so many people in poverty. “So many things. Also, I was living in exile, so I was very angry at what was happening politically in Chile.”

The left-wing president, her father’s cousin Salvador Allende, was assassinated in 1973; a military dictatorship ruled for the next 17 years. “Chile was the strongest, longest democracy in the continent. That ended in 24 hours with the coup,” Allende says.

Fired with that fury, she embarked on telling the story of four generations of Chilean women, drawing on her family history. The novel, published in 1982, propelled her to the front ranks of modern literature; Allende, now an exceptionally elegant 83, is the author of numerous books that together have sold 75 million copies in 42 languages.

This year a young Chilean team has adapted this literary landmark as an eight-part series that, remarkably, captures the sweep, brutality and magic of the original. “It was sort of a crazy decision,” says Francisca Alegria, recalling the moment she and her showrunner partners, Fernanda Urrejola and Andres Wood, were first offered the piece. It is not the first time it has been adapted: a lacklustre movie with Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep came out in 1993. This is the first version to spring from the story’s home turf.

House of the Spirits opens in the first decade of the 20th century, where the liberal senator Severo del Valle and his wife Nivea, a vigorous campaigner for votes for women, preside over a happily sprawling family. Youngest girl Clara is their special child, whose gift of second sight is taken entirely seriously by the family and the estate workers who line up to have their fortunes told.

Clara’s most beloved older sister is the dazzlingly beautiful Rosa, who captures the heart of a passing stranger called Esteban Trueba. He courts her from afar, working as a gold prospector with one goal: to make a fortune that will make him worthy of Rosa. Fate intervenes, however; they never marry. Years later, Clara claims him. He is now rich, but monstrous; he has revived his family’s moribund estancia where he treats the tied workers – especially the women – abominably. Clara, however, knows him to be her destiny.

In the novel, the story is told largely by Trueba, but Alegria and Urrejola gravitated to his granddaughter Alba’s voice. “Rereading the novel many times, we sort of found the DNA on the very last page,” Alegria says. “In the epilogue, Alba reflects on everything that has happened. It’s she who articulates her family’s story, she who puts words to circumstances that the previous generations could not name.”

Like Allende herself, in fact, who remembers becoming ill with outrage at the way her mother was treated by her father long before she could put a name to that sense of injustice.

Since 1988, Allende has lived in California. She surprised herself, along with everyone else, by marrying her third husband at the age of 77. Over Zoom, she gives every impression of contentment. America isn’t an entirely easy fit right now, however. “I have a foundation,” she says – the Isabel Allende Foundation, which she established in memory of her late daughter Paula – “and I work mostly with refugees and migrants. I see what is going, on and it’s appalling, to tell you the truth.”

House of the Spirits is banned from school libraries in several American states. “It’s an honour, actually,” Allende says brusquely. “They don’t tell you why. It could be sex, but I think it must be politics: the fact that it’s a book that denounces a lot of things.”

The saga of the Truebas was inspired by Allende’s family history but, she says, the story itself took her in other directions. For much of her childhood, she and her mother Panchita lived with her grandparents. Esteban Trueba, a malevolent misogynist whose sense of entitlement as a landowner would sit easily with the fascists of a later generation, has been widely assumed to be a portrait of her grandfather. The story thus holds him – along with his times and crimes – to terrible account.

It wasn’t quite like that, she says firmly. “When I started the book, it was my grandfather,” she says. “The self-made man who comes from virtually nothing, makes a fortune and becomes a powerful guy and authoritarian conservative, that’s my grandfather.” Trueba, however, went his own wicked way. How and why, she really doesn’t know.

“My grandfather was the most decent human being. He would never have raped or killed anybody. I don’t know what happened to Esteban Trueba in the book. He just changed. He betrayed me, in a way. By the end, I had a horrible villain I’d never planned.” Fortunately, her grandfather died before the book was published. “He would have been so offended.”

Meanwhile, Allende’s grandmother was the model for Clara; she aspired to the powers Clara has been given. “My grandmother was experimenting with the paranormal all her short life,” the writer says. “She had three friends, who were sisters. They would all get together for seances every week. They lived separately in the city, and they would send each other apple pie recipes by telepathy. They never worked, not because the telepathy didn’t work but because they were terrible cooks! So I grew up with that.”

It is Clara who sees the spirits of the title. One of the remarkable things about the book and the series is the way the other-worldly slips between the scenes. We see ghosts, but it is not a ghost story; we see Clara move a pepper shaker with her mind, just to see if she can, but it never feels eerie.

“In Latin American literature, the moments of magic are very rooted in reality,” Alegria says. The directors’ challenge was to make these perceptions feel real; the key was to keep it subtle. “You don’t need the pepper shaker to fly round the room. Any human being moving an object just one centimetre: that’s huge.” A colour tint to the image or the sounds of nature could suggest heightened senses. “But let’s not go too far,” the writers would tell each other. “This is not fantasy.”

Are the spirits also part of the Allende collective memory? “For me, I don’t see ghosts,” Allende says. “I’m not particularly superstitious.” She has rituals; for example, she begins writing each book on January 8. “I’m disciplined and that’s more of a discipline than a superstition.” But that doesn’t mean she’s entirely an unbeliever, either.

“We live in a very mysterious world,” she says. “We don’t have the answers for everything. I’m surrounded by presences. What are my presences? My mother, my daughter, my stepfather, the animals I have had in my life, the people I have loved who are dead or who are so far away I never see them. I keep them with me, in an exercise of love, imagination and memory.” Then she commits them to the page – writing always in Spanish, the language of home. “We all need magic to understand the world and there are just different ways of handling it.”

The House of the Spirits is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

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