The Book vs. the Movie
The book The House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende is a fictional novel set in Chile in the 1930s through 1970s. The movie “The House of the Spirits” was made in the 1990s from the book Allende wrote. Although the movie is similar to the book, many of the characters and event are different. Also, many of the important events that are in the book fail to exist in the movie. The beginning of the book and movie, it opened with Rosa.
But, in the book, Rosa is a beautiful girl who has green hair and “there was something of the fish to her, but her two legs placed her squarely on the tenuous line between a human being and a creature of myth”,(4-5). The novel made her seem that she was beyond beautiful and that no one can compare to her. In the movie, she is more standard looking with blonde hair and didn’t look that attractive. In both the movie and book Rosa dies after drinking brandy, but, in the movie, she drinks it at the party they throw for Severo del Valle, Rosas father.
In the book, she drinks it because she was feeling sick and the doctor told her to drink it. In the book, Alba, Blanca’s daughter, has Rosa’s hair but in the movie, she is an ordinary little girl. In the book, Allende portrays Esteban as a monster that rapes numerous women trying to fill the emptiness he had after Rosa died and he moved to Tres Marias. In the movie, he rapes one named Pancha and later gets pregnant by him. She later comes to see him and introduces him to his son, Esteban Garcia. He pretends not to know what she’s talking about but gives her money to leave and never come back.
In the book, Esteban Garcia has a son and it is he who goes to Esteban Truebas for a recommendation to go “to the police academy and a government subsidy to pay for his studies”, (287) in the movie, it’s Esteban Truebas son who goes and looks for him. He goes into the military and later is the one who questions Alba about Miguel’s whereabouts. In the movie, Blanca is the only child of Clara and Esteban. In the Book, Clara had twins named Jaime and Nicholas and Jaime went into the medical field and Nicholas went to India to find spirituality.
In both movie and book Esteban Truebas hits Clara knocking her teeth out and she moves back to the house on the corner, but in the book, “Clara never spoke to her husband again”, (201), and always nodded when he asked her a question, but in the movie, she talks to him again after he comes looking for at the house on the corner. In both movie and book, Jean de Satigny wants Blanca to be his wife, and Blanca refuses to marry him and doesn’t. In the book, Blanca marries Jean not knowing why she did it.
They move North and Blanca refuses to be intimate with him, making up excuses and the only thing she looks forward to are her mother’s letters. Jean has a secret sex room where he takes sex pictures of the servants that work in the house where Blanca and Jean live; Blanca goes in when nobody is home, and it terrifies Blanca to the point that she goes back to the house on the corner, pregnant and gave birth to Alba there and never saw Jean again. “Alba was told that her father was a distinguished and intelligent aristocrat who had unfortunately succumbed to fever in the northern desert”, (265).
In the book, Alba grows up and becomes a woman who follows in her mother’s footsteps falling in love with a revolutionary named Miguel. Her mother, Blanca fell in love with Pedro Tercero a socialist that was hated by Esteban Truebas because of what he tried to do in Tres Marias. He was not seen for many years after the fight he and Esteban Truebas had in the sawmill factory. He didn’t appear until the Socialist party had won. In the movie, Blanca gets taken away by the military forces because she was a socialist.
In the book, it was Alba who gets taken away because of the man she was dating, Miguel. She was beaten to the point she “invoked the understanding spirits of her grandmother, so that they would help her die. But no one answered her call for help,” (409). In the movie, Garcia didn’t have any sympathy for Blanca, but the book, he pretended to care and asked her if she wanted a cigarette and a cup of coffee, he just wanted to know where Miguel was. In the book, Garcia brutalizes Alba, but it is not as graphic in the movie. In conclusion, the movie resembled the book to a limited extent.
Some of the roles were reversed and some of the roles were not played. Viewers get an understanding of the book in the movie, but they miss important details that are in the book. To me, the book was better and it gave a sense what it would’ve been like to live in Chile in those years. The movie probably didn’t have the full cast of the book and important events because they had a budget and movies are expensive to do, so they had to work with what they had.
Bibliography
Allende, Isabel. The House of The Spirits. New York: Bantam Books, 1993.
