ak to the spirits and to see the future shows that process is the meaning in her life. By contrast, her husband Esteban is dedicated entirely to goals--first to becoming rich, then to marrying well, then to building on his riches and his prestige, and ultimately to preserving all that he has built.
The importance of the style known as magical realism in expressing the woman's point of view is apparent from the opening paragraph:
Barrabas came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. She was already in the habit of writing down important matters, and afterward, when she was mute, she also recorded trivialities, never suspecting that fifty years later I would use her notebooks to reclaim the past and overcome terrors of my own (Allende 1).
This opening passage also indicates that Clara's granddaughter is narrating this novel, a girl who, some fifty years later, is looking back to an earlier time and trying to recapture some sense of the past and of the struggle of her grandmother. The "I" is unnamed, and when the "I" disa
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