The thing too many people miss about magic realism, I think, is the realism part. The literary tradition of juxtaposing the fantastical and the gritty, which was particularly pronounced in the work of such 20th-century Latin American authors as Jorge Luis Borges or Gabriel García Márquez, reached one of its high points with Isabel Allende’s classic 1982 novel “The House of the Spirits.” After a much-disparaged 1993 film adaptation, Allende’s epic tale has now been turned into a sumptuous Amazon Prime miniseries.

Shot in Chile with little expense spared, the new series makes a fine and overdue reintroduction to Allende’s epic portrait of a mid-century Chilean family during the time of wrenching upheaval that culminated in the 1970s with the brutal, U.S.-backed military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Too often for my taste, though, the series smooths over the novel’s pungent mix of the grotesque and the beatific, favoring windy supernaturalism over grounded realism. While it does not flinch from some of the extremes of Allende’s narrative, which begins with a mysterious poisoning and builds to harrowing scenes of torture, this “House” often feels too tidy. If Allende’s book felt like an overflowing cabinet of curiosities in which the spiritual and the earthly jostled together with vivid, often startling immediacy, the series feels more like a standard-issue period drama, with narrative shocks and embraces alike served up in gorgeously appointed tableaux.

Still, the series creators, Francisca Alegría and Fernanda Urrejola, both Chilean filmmakers, deserve credit for deftly compressing Allende’s dense, sprawling novel into eight very watchable episodes. I especially relished the casting, not only of the major roles but in several supporting ones; I’ve seldom seen a family age through generations so convincingly and seamlessly.

One casting choice even has a meta-narrative quality: The clairvoyant matriarch Clara del Valle, whom we meet as a young girl and follow through a disastrous, consequential marriage to a cruel land owner, is played brilliantly by three actresses over the span of the series, particularly Dolores Fonzi, her final portrayer, who casts a mesmeric figure as a distracted, white-haired seer attuned to cosmic frequencies. But that land owner, Esteban Trueba, is played through the decades by just one actor, Alfonso Herrera, who ages believably from an ardent young striver into a crusty, withered padrone. Surely it says something about the stubborn persistence of the patriarchy that the man stays the same while the women around him change.

It also speaks to one of the novel’s toughest challenges, and greatest achievements, which the series also wrestles with: its portrayal of Trueba himself. While he is clearly the story’s great villain, with a long list of crimes and misdemeanors against his family and his workers, he is also in some ways its chief protagonist, with a tragic arc to which Allende grants surprising sympathy; she even writes a good portion of the novel in his first-person voice.

But her heart, and that of the series, clearly beats in sync with the generations of remarkable del Valle/Trueba women: Clara, whose paranormal talents include psychic insights and some light telekinesis; her daughter Blanca (Sara Becker), who endures a sham marriage to a sadistic count but bears a child with her true love, a peasant singer; and their love child, Alba (Rochi Hernández), the story’s main narrator, who draws out the family’s story via her grandmother Clara’s copious journals.

To their credit, production designer Rodrigo Bazaes Nieto and cinematographer Manuel Alberto Claro conjure some indelible images. The high-ceilinged blue bedroom where Clara spends most of her adult years, for instance, is like magic realism expressed as interior design. And the sight of Blanca emerging from a sand dune as if reborn, after being caught in a windstorm while on the run from her controlling husband, matches the haunting expressiveness of Allende’s prose (all the more striking, since this moment is not in the novel).

But the main images you may take away from “The House of the Spirits” are faces: Clara, with her resplendent white mane, dreamily but intently pacing through her rooms as if she can see through the walls; a resentful, long-faced young farm worker, Esteban García, who grows into a cold-eyed police torturer; spiny, tremulous Férula (Fernanda Castillo), Clara’s sister-in-law, clinging vainly to a love that dare not speak its name.

This iconographic focus on faces may be the most Catholic thing about the series. Elsewhere it soft-pedals the syncretic religious sensibility that animates Allende’s novel. Its first major scene is set during a Mass, when young Clara impertinently interrupts the homily to challenge the priest about the existence of hell. We see statues of saints among the clutter of the quasi-ashram that Clara eventually establishes in her home. And at one point a priest tells a young rebel, “God is on the right, but Jesus is always on the left.”

That bit of folk Marcionism aside, the root belief system of “The House of the Spirits” is the kind of theological determinism that holds that all things happen for a reason, and that its characters are all merely links in “the chain of events that had to complete itself.” The notion that time is merely a fiction—that it’s just the way we move through events that have been preordained, like moving a finger across a pre-drawn map—is a seductive temptation for storytellers, especially omniscient ones, who can tease with foreshadowing, then tie everything up with a bow by the end.

Indeed, in the novel’s final pages, as in the series, young Alba feels that she’s finally put together the puzzle pieces of her family’s previously incomprehensible story. But, in reflecting on Trueba’s journey in particular, she adds a crucial realization that offers an escape route from a predetermined fate: that telling this story truthfully might break the cycle of violence that nearly consumed her family and her country. The same choice confronts our own divided national soul. At its best, “The House of the Spirits” offers us a well-appointed place to meditate on that quandary.

Rob Weinert-Kendt, an arts journalist and editor of American Theatre magazine, has written for The New York Times and Time Out New York.