Julian, the writer-protagonist of The Private Lives of Trees (Open Letter, 2010), is haunted by a moment from his university days, when the memories of the dictatorship loomed large. The next two novels do just that they give some direction to this melancholy sense of aimlessness. It’s an affecting passage, but on first read it seems like a missed opportunity: the rich moment could have been held a little longer in suspension. The eighty-something pages end abruptly when the young writer learns of his lover’s suicide and asks a cab driver to circle him around the city for 30,000 pesos, the amount in his wallet. Zambra’s first book to appear in English was Bonsai (Melville House, 2008), a potent novella with a new take on the anxiety of influence: the protagonist is an aspiring writer, considered for the task of transcribing an older author’s handwritten manuscript.

Where the first two read like sketches for potential stories, or blueprints for how to tell them, the latest book achieves dramatic tension and emotional immediacy without ever shortchanging the overarching ambition: namely, to create a novel that exposes, and springs from, its own scaffolding. While it is only a few dozen pages longer than the first two, it is by far the most fully developed. Like they do, it deals with the processes of writing and storytelling this, though, is as far as the similarities go. The most recent, Ways of Going Home, translated by Megan McDowell, resembles the others to a point. I read his first two novels in translation in a single afternoon, but their momentum stayed with me for days. The Chilean poet and novelist Alejandro Zambra has swiftly become one of my favorite contemporary writers.

Ways of Going Home by Alejandro Zambra