Rather bizzare

I majored in Spanish in college and I like to try and keep up as much as I can, so that I didn't waste 4 years and a whole lot of money. So once in a while I'll watch Univision (Sabado Gigante!) or read a book in Spanish.

I've got a couple of methods for reading untranslated literature. Sometimes I'll read the whole thing through, painstakingly with my dictionary. Sometimes I'll read the book through, sans dictionary, then buy the English equivalent and see what I've missed or if I agree with the translation. Sometimes though, I'll really cheat and read the English version first.

That's what I'm doing right now, with Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits. It's been on my reading list for a couple of years and when I was shopping for books for jury duty I grabbed an English copy for fun. I read a different book that day so I've just gotten around to reading this one. All I have to say it is one of the most bizzare things I've ever read. I'm so glad I didn't get cocky and try to read the Spanish version first. People and dogs die left and right, there's a daughter who looks like a mermaid, but isn't, and then gets killed and is transformed back into the mermaid she never was???? HUH? If I'd been trying to read it in Spanish I would've been completely lost, or only on page two because I would have had to look up every other word because the context just isn't there for me to pick it up from the rest of the sentence.

I've read some bizarre stuff in Spanish before, a couple of really cool short stories by Almodovar, that were strange and twisted and you weren't quite sure which part of the story was real. And Like Water for Chocolate which wasn't so much bizarre but you had to swallow the fact that it had to be read as a folk story, you know the whole "magic realism" BS.

But this book is just strange. It switches perspectives, so that the narrator changes from section to section and not always at a the beginning of a new chapter, sometimes between two paragraphs. The closest thing I've ever read to this before was As I Lay Dying and I couldn't even get half way through that thing. "My mother is a fish." WHAT?

So I'm struggling away with this thing because if it stays in one perspective long enough the story is pretty interesting. But I almost threw the thing away last night when the dog was killed with a butcher knife and the fiancee had it turned into a rug. That's just not right.