Magical...

Isabel Allende's novel The House of the Spirits is in the magical realism genre.  Although there is some magic in the book, I'm not entirely convinced that the magic really did much for the story.  There are little bits of it throughout the book, but I think that if it were omitted, the story would probably be just as good.  

Clara is the character who is most influenced by magic.  In the beginning of the book, she predicts that someone in the family will die.  This comes to pass when her sister, Rosa, is poisoned.  Clara feels that it is her fault since she said something, so she stops talking for her whole childhood.  This ability to tell the future comes up several more times, when she predicts an earthquake and predicts the outcomes of the elections, among other things.  Although this adds interest to the story by adding foreshadowing, but could be omitted and the story wouldn't change much.  There is foreshadowing elsewhere in the book, like in the sections that Alba is narrating, and that isn't because she is telling the future magically, it is because she is looking back on events.  It seems that this foreshadowing would have been enough to keep the plot moving, if that is what Allende was trying to do.

Clara also is able to move objects without touching them and communicates with the spirits somehow.  She spends a lot of time at her three legged table and has some cards, but other than keeping her occupied and giving her something to do, it doesn't add much to the story.  She never changes events using her power, as far as we know, and never uses her power to move things to do anything to anyone, so it seems pointless that she is able to do these things.  She meets the Mora sisters because of her interest in magic, but they don't do anything for the plot either.  Magic mostly affects Clara's personality.  She is aloof and seems to be able to disconnect herself from her body, as if she is not really there.  Although this is important to the story, it seems as though some normal people are this way, magical powers or not.

Other people in the story have some connection to magic, but very little.  Rosa and Alba are born with green hair...big whoop.  Clara's dog, Barrabas, grows to be as big as a horse...so what?  A few of the characters play around with cards and show interest in Clara's magic...hmmm...  Esteban Trueba believes that he sees Clara with him after she dies…a ghost?  It just doesn't seem to be all that important to me.

The book was fairly good, although I disagreed with a whole lot of it.  The magic part just seemed silly in the light of all of the other stuff that was going on in the book.  So, Allende put a little magic in it, but I don't feel like it was a huge deal in relationship to all of the important messages she was trying to send.  I guess maybe she was just adding interest, which I guess is important in a 430 page book. It makes me wonder if other magical realism books rely more on the magic.  I guess I'd have to read another story like this one...maybe someday