Ask an American to conjure up associations with the date Sept. 11, and likely the answer will describe the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Ask a Chilean of a certain age, and the answer will concern the coup d’etat that overthrew the socialist government of Salvador Allende—with the help, naturally, of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

Thousands of Chileans were disappeared and killed during the 17 years of military dictatorship that followed. One who would certainly have been murdered had she not fled to Venezuela was the journalist and playwright Isabel Allende, a second cousin of the fallen president.

On learning of the impending death of her grandfather, Allende wrote him a letter that grew into her first novel, La casa de los espíritus, published in Spain in 1982. Three years later it appeared in English translation as The House of the Spirits, one of the hallmark works of the “post-boom” generation of Latin American novels that followed Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

That death-haunted tale informs Allende’s. At the center stands Clara del Valle Trueba, who, true to her name, is clairvoyant. The first words in the book, “Barrabás came to us by sea,” are hers; the last are the same words, contained in a notebook that her granddaughter has saved, “smuggled out by certain friendly spirits” and thus spared a torching by the security police.

Clara, who “had inherited the runaway imagination of all the women in the family on her mother’s side,” has a knack for seeing those spirits. There are many of them, including, in time, her uncle Marcos and her sister Rosa. The latter is the most beautiful of the del Valle sisters, “who seemed to have been made of a different material from the rest of the human race.” Rosa drives a young suitor named Esteban Trueba to distraction, and to win her he descends into the mines of the Atacama Desert to seek his fortune. He finds it, but Rosa dies, the victim of poison meant for her politician father.

Esteban restores an old plantation, misbehaving as a reactionary grandee will, but in time he returns and marries Clara. The dead mount: The junta murders their son, a gentle doctor, for not falsely issuing a death certificate ruling suicide as the cause of the overthrown president’s death, as was falsely alleged of Salvador Allende’s. Her mother turns up to reveal the location of the head that had been separated from her body in a car crash. Unlike his real-life model, the singer and poet Victor Jara, the socialist son of Esteban’s foreman, Pedro Tercero García, survives relatively unscathed, living in exile with his wife, Blanca, the oldest Trueba daughter.

Isabel Allende has published many books since The House of the Spirits, most recently the novel Violeta, in which she also revisits the years of the military junta. Forty years on, her debut book remains an essential work of modern Latin American literature.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.