The 3 best books by Alejandro Zambra

It must be something from its direct view of the Pacific Ocean, that enormous blue where one can get rid of memory and the past. The point is that a good handful of recent Chilean narrators have the privileged honor of addressing the deepest narrative. From the now disappeared and mythologized Roberto bolaño but also Alexander Zambra going through the poetry of Nicanor Parra or the most popular narrative of Isabel Allende.

Of course, uniformity is quite daring, even taking the origin of the creators on duty as a shared imagination. Because it is contradictory to baptize as current what everyone writes with the intention of exorcism or in search of their own placebos. But our reason is like this, accustomed to labels with difficult solutions. Something very different is that, sharing idiosyncrasies, moral patterns, social circumstances and a geographical influence as overwhelming as the drawing of Chile as the Pacific coast from north to south, something ends up being shared in that first motivation...

Discovering Alejandro Zambra is to recreate his poetic vision inherited from Parra himself to let the lyricism end up being overshadowed by devastating prose. In the midst of this unique process of language, there are characters who survive the brilliant embellishment and subsequent cruel subjugation of ruthless realism. The actions are not free of critical connotations in social, moral and political aspects. Something for which, in the end, a poet ends up attacking a prose in which he already exposes all kinds of realities.

Top 3 best novels by Alejandro Zambra

Chilean poet

We start from that open grave recognition. Everything that will happen in this novel happens from the prism of a Chilean poet who discovers the disordered verses of life. And he will not be one of the most capable of putting order to nonsense. The truth is that life has the recited musicality of a numerical series, only that sometimes, as we all know, after the most bland series of numbers the jackpot ends up.

For much of this novel, Gonzalo is a poetster who wants to be a poet and a stepfather who behaves as if he were Vicente's biological father, a boy addicted to cat food who years later refuses to study at the university because his His main dream is to become -also- a poet, despite the advice of Carla, his proudly lonely mother, and of León, a mediocre father dedicated to collecting toy cars.

The powerful myth of Chilean poetry - a minor character says, alluding to the verdicts of the Swedish Academy, that Chileans are two-time world poetry champions - is revisited and questioned by Pru, a gringo journalist who becomes an accidental witness of this elusive and intense world of literary heroes and impostors.

"True seriousness is comic," said Nicanor Parra, and this novel about poets who despise novels demonstrates it brilliantly. The current masculine labyrinth, the tragic ups and downs of love, fleeting families – or stepfamilies –, the omnipresent distrust in institutions and authorities, the brave and stubborn desire to belong to a community that is partly imaginary, the meaning of writing and reading in a hostile world that seems to be collapsing at full speed... There are many topics that this beautiful, forceful and light-hearted book brings to the table. Author of works that have become emblematic, such as Bonsai, Ways to go home, My documents o Facsimile, Alejandro Zambra makes a big comeback to the novel with this book that confirms him as one of the fundamental voices of Latin American literature so far this century.

Chilean poet, by Alejandro Zambra

Bonsai and the private life of trees

Compiling Zambra's works is always a success because the background of his work is always there, like that thread that manages to give meaning to everything. The unmistakable power of this narrator's story manages to make literature a balance between substance and form of unusual value. Who makes the novel a viewer to discover the life philosophies of his characters, kaleidoscopic impressions about a life that is always mutable to each new character who sees it, these types of narrators are the ones who certainly make a valuable chronicle of an era because they rescue the most transcendently human of everything.

Condemned to seriousness and imposture, Julio, the silent protagonist of Bonsai - the novel that marked the brilliant narrative debut of Alejandro Zambra - ends up convincing himself that it is better to lock himself in his room to observe the growth of a bonsai than to wander through the uncomfortable paths of literature.

In The Private Life of Trees, the author's second novel, Verónica is inexplicably delayed and the book continues until she returns or until Julián is sure that she will never return. Why read and write books in a world about to break down? This question haunts the two works by Alejandro Zambra that we gather in this volume, the gateway to one of the most interesting writers of recent generations.

Bonsai and the private life of trees

Ways to go home

Starting from the maxim that says that you should never return to the places where you were happy, reality ends up confirming that this is precisely our fate, to return. It is one thing to leave the past behind and grow and quite another is the inescapable magnetism of what we were, something that attracts us as a physical force similar to gravity, dependent on telluric. He always comes back and we can only decide the best way to go home.

Ways to go home speaks of the generation of those who, as the narrator says, learned to read or draw while their parents became accomplices or victims of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. The long-awaited third novel by Alejandro Zambra shows Chile in the mid-eighties from the life of a nine-year-old boy.

The author points to the need for a children's literature, for a look that stands up to the official versions. But it is not only about killing the father but also about really understanding what happened in those years. That is why the novel reveals its own construction, through a diary in which the writer registers his doubts, his purposes and also how the disturbing presence of a woman influences his work.

With precision and melancholy, Zambra reflects on the past and present of Chile. Ways to go home It is the most personal novel by one of the best storytellers of the new generations. A book that confirms what Ricardo Piglia has said about Alejandro Zambra: "A remarkable writer, very perceptive in the face of the diversity of forms."

Ways to go home
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