Until the publication in 1982 of Isabel Allende's La Casa de los Espíritus (The House of the Spirits), few female writers had emerged from the boom in Latin American literature that began in the 1960s. When the English-language translation of La Casa de los Espíritus appeared in 1985, however, Allende received the kind of international attention that had previously been reserved for such writers as the Colombian Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel Garca Mrquez. In fact, The House of Spirits has frequently been compared with Garca Mrquez's masterpiece Cien Años de Soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970) because of Allende's mixing of magical and realistic elements, and the novels multi-generational plot. While there are some similarities between the two works, The House of the Spirits is distinguished by its author's unique perspective as a woman and a Chilean. ...