Alejandro Zambra - Bonsai (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2022) ****

Bonsai is a wonderful and short story of two young Chilean people, Julio and Emilia, who meet each other, have a relationship, then drift apart again. Emilia dies and Julio lives on. That is already written in the first sentence: 

"In the end she dies and he is alone, although really he had been alone for some years before her death, before Emilia's death."

Julio and Emilia are students of literature, so references abound, especially Proust, but also Mishima, Perec, Carver. The novel is short, but every sentence is a little gem of economic writing: precise, surprising, evocative. 

"One fine or perhaps very bad day, chance led them to the pages of The Book of Fantasy edited by Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Silvina Ocampo. After envisioning crypts and doorless houses, after taking in­Yentory of the traits of unnameable ghosts, they landed on 'Tantalia', a short story by Macedonio Fernandez that affected them deeply. 

'Tantalia' is the tale of a couple who decide to buy a lit­tle plant to keep as a symbol of the love that binds them. Too late, they realize that if the plant dies, the love that binds them will die too. And since the love that binds them is immense and they aren't willing to sacrifice it for anything, they decide to lose the plant amid a crowd of identical plants. Then comes the desolation, the tragedy of knowing that now they can never find it again. "

 It's a story of vulnerability, nostalgia and loss. It is less about love or sentimentality. It's also a story about creating and shaping. Julio wants to write a novel, but ends up by writing a fake translation of a novel by someone else, and their relationship is being shaped like a little bonsai, it is not the real thing - love - but its minor format, easier to deal with, easier to shape. 

"The end of this story should give us hope, but it does not."

The story is precious, like language and words are precious. Zambra demonstrates again that 'less is more'.  

Alejandro Zambra - Ways Of Going Home (Granta, 2013) ***½

In "Ways Of Going Home", vertelt Alejandro Zambra het verhaal van een jongetje van negen dat door de iets oudere Claudia wordt gevraagd zijn buurman te schaduwen en haar wekelijks op de hoogte te houden van zijn doen en laten. We zijn in Chili ten tijde van Pinochet.

Voor de jonge ik-figuur is de politieke context een verwarrend geheel. Hij herhaalt woorden als "communist" en "christen-democraat", maar zonder hun betekenis te kennnen, maar wel aanvoelend of zijn omgeving deze woorden met respect of verachting uitspreekt, en voor de rest enkel op context kan afgaan om tot conclusies te komen. "To me, a communist was someone who read the newspaper and silently bore the mockery of others - I thought of my grandfather, my father's father, who was always reading the newspaper".

"As for Pinochet, to me he was a television personality who hosted a show with no fixed schedule, and I hated him for that, for the stuffy national channels that interrupted their programming during the best parts."

Parallel aan dat jeugdverhaal, is er het verhaal van de schrijver, die in deze tijd leeft, en met zijn vriendin Eme, van gedachten wisselt over de roman zelf, maar ook over herinneringen, de relaties met de ouders. Beide niveaus zijn dus op zoek naar manieren om "thuis te geraken", de weg te vinden, de ene fictie, de andere in de werkelijkheid.

Een mooie roman, maar het zou in mijn ogen nog sterker zijn geweest had hij zich enkel beperkt tot het fictieve luik van het verhaal.