ALEJANDRO ZAMBRA
Alejandro Zambra is a novelist, critic and poet from Santiago, Chile. Born and schooled under the Pinochet regime, he studied in Santiago de Chile and Madrid after its fall. His first book, the wry metafictional novella Bonsai (1997), was described as a “bloodletting in Chilean literature” by the national press. His subsequent novels The Private Lives of Trees (2007) and Ways of Going Home (2011), and his story collections My Documents (2013) and Multiple Choice (2014), share interests in writing, childhood, Chilean politics, plants, pets and families, as well as deft, bonsai-esque minimalist forms. A collection of his critical writing and essays, forming a “blurry self-portrait”, was published in English in 2018 as Not to Read. His latest novel, Chilean Poet, is out this year in a gregarious English translation by Megan McDowell. It follows the drifting and regathering of a small Chilean family and offers an impassioned ode – both anguished and amused – to the idiosyncratic world of Chilean poetry.
Interview by Louis RogersPortrait by Rodrigo Jardon
Louis Rogers Let me start with physical attributes: at 368 pages, Chilean Poet is much bigger than your previous short stories, novellas and poems. Did you set out to write a big book? How did the project evolve?
Alejandro Zambra I’m sorry about that; writing short books was more elegant, but this was just the way it came out. Let’s say that I was finally possessed by the demon of storytelling! I’m kidding, maybe. I did feel this delicate, painstaking urgency to discover characters and spaces. Maybe at first I imagined this novel would be short, but the story itself showed me the way. I adore that moment when you hardly know a character, so you have to discover them by making up what he or she would say. There is a lot of pleasure there.
LR Several judgements are voiced throughout the book on the question of novels versus poems: which is more difficult; which is more meaningful; which can be a funding model for the other. You write both. How do the two forms interact or compete for you?
AZ It is not a competition! I like drafting, that is what I really do every morning. I like working without forcing the images to fit in any genre or style. My feeling is that I translate those images, and maybe there is a point where I could stop but I don’t, and then the prose appears and the storytelling appears and I betray the poem and make it a novel. Anyway, most of the characters in Chilean Poet hate novels; they wouldn’t read this book.
LR At one point, your narrator refers to writing as a conversation with oneself. At another, we witness a character experience writing as a liberating, discursive experiment: “As she writes, she feels a warm assurance; she likes her phrasing, and her conclusions, which are not absolute. On the contrary, they retain an ambiguous, hesitant air, a little like someone thinking out loud. She rereads her first notes and at times disagrees with herself, and she loves that, she has always liked changing her mind.” There’s a lovely lack of angst here. Does this reflect your experience of writing? Do you encounter a particular version of yourself there?
AZ Yes. I think that is what writing is about. It is, in the first place, giving oneself the opportunity to be silly, to allow yourself to show your doubts, your anguish, your very dangerous joy, your stupidity, your frustrations. Writing is always writing badly, at first, then you insist and work on a bad sentence until you make it shine and start believing that it doesn’t belong to you any more.
LR In your essay collection, Not to Read, and in your fiction, you reflect on the effects of different tools on writing and reading – on how novels changed when they started to be written on personal computers, or what is particular about reading a photocopied novel. How do you write now? Which are the best tools for the job?
AZ All of them, but I always start writing by hand. I’ve never abandoned handwriting and nowadays I especially love how deeply offline it takes you. Also, I love the proximity between handwriting and drawing, maybe because I’m very bad at drawing, so writing is my way of drawing. Sometimes I do something very stupid, which is to write out a text by hand that I’ve already typed up on the computer. But I think it is useful to feel the words, the rhythm, the sentences, the flow. Voice is also essential. I used to record pieces that were almost finished and listen back to them. They would change a lot through that exercise. Sometimes I use those robots that read aloud; it is very funny and a bit ridiculous to hear your own writing read aloud by a robot. Then there is a moment where you really find yourself concentrating on the text. I mean, you forget both that you are listening to a robot and that it is reading something written by you. I love that moment.
LR Your previous book Multiple Choice took the form of a comprehension exam. It’s recalled by a school report reproduced in full in Chilean Poet. That report is then echoed in a later passage evaluating the characters’ lives: registering the things they do “always”, “occasionally”, and “never”. What do you think we can learn from these reductive formats or systems – in writing or life?
AZ Nothing. I hate those forms. That is why I used them. We are stuck all day filling forms and reducing everything to numbers. It is disheartening and boring and aggressive.
LR Your character Gonzalo is the latest in a train of stepfathers, surrogate fathers and sort-of-fathers in your books. The Private Lives of Trees is shaped around a constantly sprouting bedtime story told by a stepfather to his stepdaughter while they wait, anxiously, for her mother to get home. And there’s Camilo from your story collection, My Documents, a prodigal godson who becomes a kind of father-brother to his godfather’s son. Can you explain your interest in “alternative” families and these kinds of relationships?
AZ I think all contemporary discussions are in some way about legitimacy and belonging, and stepparents deal with this problem all the time. It is such a special and many-faceted and challenging kind of relationship. I mean, you fall in love with someone who already has a child, so you find yourself in an unexpected and ambiguous position. The relationship with the child will tend to grow, and you start wondering what is going to happen if your relationship with their biological parent ends. Focusing on stepfatherhood is also a meaningful way of approaching the complex relationship Chileans have with the idea of a father-dictator. Our perpetual conflict with authority becomes crucial when we become the parents, the authorities. Gonzalo relates to fatherhood and authority in a confused and flickering way, and I was interested in narrating those ups and downs, those inconsistencies of everyday life.
LR Connected with this – but also distinct, maybe – is your interest in childhood. All your books, I think, have important and complex and funny child characters. These children are insightful and, as you said, have serious, significant, multifaceted relationships with adults and with each other. I’m also struck by your epigraph to Chilean Poet from Alain-Fournier: “There is no house, no parents, no love / There are only playmates.” How has your attitude to the experience and perspective of childhood changed over the years?
AZ We never stop thinking about childhood. Lately, the way that I think about it has totally changed, because four years ago I became a father. So I’ve been relearning certain things and learning many others for the first time. During the first months of the pandemic, my son was at that beautiful stage where kids only know a few words but start mixing them up in order to communicate. There were two opposite movements. On the one hand, the pandemic made me feel that language was basically useless, imprecise and unmoored, but at the same time my kid was bringing language back to life; he was learning it, enjoying it, playing with it. As many people were, I was looking out of the windows too much, overwatering the plants on the balcony; I was perplexed, confused, frightened. One morning my kid was telling me a story about something that had happened recently. “When was that?” I asked him. And instead of saying “yesterday”, he answered “casi hoy”, which means “almost today”. And he was right, because during the pandemic I have often felt that “yesterday” was not “yesterday” but more like “almost today”, and that “tomorrow” was “almost today”, too.
LR This novel is set around different parts of Chile and also takes a trip to New York. Your author biography on the dust jacket tells us you’re based in Mexico City now. What role did Mexico play in this book – and what role does it have in your writing now?
AZ I’ve been living in Mexico City since 2016. That was one of the reasons I needed to write this novel. Or maybe I should say that I needed this novel to be written. When I moved to Mexico City, I started wondering what kind of Chilean I was going to become. There was this bad feeling related to homesickness, and I felt like I could turn bitter and resentful. I wanted my nostalgia to become useful and light-hearted and bright. To make something beautiful out of it. I was halfway through a different novel and then I decided to switch, because I needed to think about my country on a different level.
LR One character, an American visitor, undertakes a kind of ethnography of the Chilean poetry scene. As an insider, and now a geographical outsider, what lessons do you think other literary cultures could learn from Chilean poetry? And who should we be reading?
AZ It is the world I belong to. I was interested in questioning how we handle nationality, how one deals with the idea of belonging to a country, and how national myths can circle above your mind, your decisions, your way of being. I was particularly interested in the literary vocation because the community of poets orbits around an intangible, spiritual power. In my novel I try to play self-critically and compassionately and humorously with those ideas. I don’t feel like I’m outside Chilean poetry, partly because I still write poetry, but mostly because my friends are still the same poet friends I made 25 years ago. Also, I keep reading and enjoying Chilean poetry more than any other literature. You should read all the Chilean poets, even the fictional ones. But perhaps I am the one who should be reading all of your poets – maybe I will. ◉