Newspaper Article

Stories from the age of computers and the legacy of Pinochet

Wimmer, Natasha

2015

Overview

\"My Documents\" is the Chilean writer [Alejandro Zambra]'s first collection of short stories and at the same time his longest book to date -- at 240-odd pages, it's a veritable tome next to \"Bonsai\" (2008, 86 pages), \"The Private Lives of Trees\" (2010, 98 pages) and \"Ways of Going Home\" (2013, 160 pages). These slight, intimate novels created a stir when they appeared in English, attracting readers who appreciated their meshing of Barthesian inquiry with the muffled malaise of daily life in post-Pinochet Chile. Their chronicles of diffident romances or precarious domestic arrangements set the stage for intensely affecting examinations of the mechanics of fiction. Behind this anger is a sense of being adrift, of living in a kind of limbo. More extreme cases of aimlessness present themselves in \"The Most Chilean Man in the World\" and \"Family Life.\" In the former, Rodrigo decides on a whim to surprise his girlfriend in Belgium, only to be rejected and left close to penniless wandering the streets of Brussels. This fable of haplessness hinges on a joke (deftly rendered by [Megan McDowell], whose matter-of-fact translation suits Mr. Zambra well) and is much lighter than the cutting \"Family Life,\" in which 40-year-old Martin house-sits for a distant cousin and entangles himself in lies. At the start of his stay, he admits to his college professor cousin that he doesn't like to read (\"The last thing I would ever do is read a book. Sorry\") and that damning admission gives way to a whole catalog of failings. The darkness of some of these stories (especially the brutal final entry, \"Artist's Rendition\") gives Mr. Zambra's work new dimension, but some of the best are those in which he flirts with sentimentality, working a more characteristic vein in which he has few peers. In the lovely \"Camilo,\" the narrator tells the story of his father's godson, a charismatic kid who takes the narrator under his wing. Camilo's father was exiled from Pinochet's Chile and lives abroad, and Camilo's own life takes a tragic turn. Years later, the narrator meets Camilo's father in Amsterdam, and they talk about soccer and the past. Their unremarkable conversation ends on an emotional note, and the narrator says: \"I think that the story can't end like that. ... But that's how it ends.\"

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: Zambra, Alejandro (1975- )