Now is the time to read and listen to Chilean writer Isabel Allende. In the middle of October of last year, protests exploded in Santiago. These demonstrations, which involved millions of Chileans, were sparked by a rise in the city’s subway fare. But the crisis is not isolated; it’s occurring against the backdrop of Chile’s early experiment with neoliberalism, which was imposed on the country by the brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet. In her 1982 novel The House of the Spirits, Allende attempted to exorcize the ghosts of that exceptionally bloody dictatorship, which began with the murder of the novelist’s uncle, the democratically elected president Salvador Allende. The ghosts of Pinochet still haunt the slim South American country. Allende will certainly have lots to say about how these ghosts have returned as the young protesters on the streets of Santiago, despite the fact that her latest novel shifts the time period backward, to the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. by Charles Mudede