Vanessa Saunders is a writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her experimental novel, The Flat Woman, won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize and was published by Fiction Collective Two and University of Alabama Press. Her writing has appeared in magazines such as Seneca Review, Los Angeles Review, Passages North, and other journals. Saunders currently works as a Professor of Practice at Loyola University in New Orleans.
At Electric Lit she tagged seven works of speculative feminism written by women. One title on the list:
House of the Spirits by Isabel AllendeRead about another entry on the list.
House of the Spirits is a feminist, socialist work of magical realism. Modeled after Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude,Isabel Allende’s novel follows four generations of the Trueba family in post-colonial Chile. Some of the book’s characters are thought to be based on real-life figures, such as Salvador Allende, a prominent Chilean socialist, and former president, as well as Pablo Neruda, poet and senator of the Chilean communist party.
This book blends a story of a country’s history with the story of a family, focusing on the magical and the fantastic like One Hundred Years of Solitude. But, unlike its predecessor, House of the Spirits focuses on the relationships between women: mother and daughter, sisters-in-law, and grandmother and granddaughter. Using a roving, omniscient point-of-review, the book highlights the impact of toxic masculinity on the women of the Trueba family.
The House of the Spirits is among Lois Parkinson Zamora's five top books to capture the magic of magical realism, Christopher Barzak's five books about magical families, and Elif Shafak's five favorite literary mothers.
--Marshal Zeringue
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