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Fiction. Literature. HTML:A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR SO FAR A WALL STREET JOURNAL TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR ONE OF NPR�??S �??BOOKS WE LOVE�?� �??A tender and funny story about love, family and the peculiar position of being a stepparent�?�[Chilean Poet] broadens the author�??s scope and quite likely his international reputation.�?� �??Los Angeles Times �??Zambra's books have long shown him to be a writer who, at the sentence level, is in a world all his own.�?� �??Juan Vidal, NPR.org A writer of �??startling talent�?� (The New York Times Book Review), Alejandro Zambra returns with his most substantial work yet: a story of fathers and sons, ambition and failure, and what it means to make a family After a chance encounter at a Santiago nightclub, aspiring poet Gonzalo reunites with his first love, Carla. Though their desire for each other is still intact, much has changed: among other things, Carla now has a six-year-old son, Vicente. Soon the three form a happy sort-of family�??a stepfamily, though no such word exists in their language. Eventually, their ambitions pull the lovers in different directions�??in Gonzalo�??s case, all the way to New York. Though Gonzalo takes his books when he goes, still, Vicente inherits his ex-stepfather�??s love of poetry. When, at eighteen, Vicente meets Pru, an American journalist literally and figuratively lost in Santiago, he encourages her to write about Chilean poets�??not the famous, dead kind, your Nerudas or Mistrals or Bolaños, but rather the living, striving, everyday ones. Pru�??s research leads her into this eccentric community�??another kind of family, dysfunctional but ultimately loving. Will it also lead Vicente and Gonzalo back to each other? In Chilean Poet, Alejandro Zambra chronicles with enormous tenderness and insight the small moments�??sexy, absurd, painful, sweet, profound�??that make up our personal histories. Exploring how we choose our families and how we betray them, and what it means to be a man in relationships�??a partner, father, stepfather, teacher, lover, writer, and friend�??it is a bol… (more)
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That background is useful to appreciate what Alejandro Zambra attempts in Chilean Poet, a book that couples a tender story of a fractured family of would-be writers living in modern-day Santiago with an homage to the scores of artists, past and present, who represent the country’s poetic heartbeat. The tale begins with Gonzalo and Carla, young working-class people, trying unsuccessfully to make a love affair survive. After separating for several years, they unexpectedly reunite and live together. This reunion includes Vicente, Carla’s young son from an earlier marriage. Gonzalo, struggling to launch his career as a poet, slides easily into the role of Vicente’s stepfather, despite not being married to Carla. When Gonzalo gets accepted to a graduate school in the United States, the couple breaks up once again, an event that sets Vicente on a path to find another home within the city’s poetry community. The story ends with Gonzalo and Vicente trying to find their way back into each other’s life after many years apart.
I enjoyed so many parts of this novel, which I found to be a moving reflection on what being part of a family truly means as well as a nice immersion into the Chilean poetry world. Zambra writes with obvious affection for his characters, especially Gonzalo and Vicente, and he deftly mixes humor with candid observations of both the good and bad sides of personal relationships in telling his story. There seems to be a clear connection to Bolaño’s earlier work, which is structured somewhat similarly, but Chilean Poet offers the reader a much more personal and relatable tale. If there is a shortcoming in the narrative, it would be that nothing much in the way of action occurs, aside from the principal characters walking the streets of Santiago and going into the city’s numerous restaurants, bars, and bookstores. Also, despite incessant conversation about the topic, there is relatively little actual poetry contained in the volume. Nevertheless, this is an engaging book by a talented author that I can happily recommend.
Often viewed as a country of poets, Zambra spends some time satirizing this community. When Pru finds herself there she interviews as many poets as possible and surmises:
'being a Chilean poet is like being a Peruvian chef or a Brazilian soccer player or a Venezuelan model...oddly, Chilean poets are more famous than fiction writers, and there are many fiction writers who wrote novels about poets...none of them work only on poetry, Are there poets in Denmark? If the Danish are really so happy, I doubt it, why would they need poets if they're happy...Maybe they do aspire to be millionaires, because Neruda was a millionaire, the goal, really is transcendence. maybe they don't rule out either possibility: becoming a millionaire or dying in poverty."
Zambra relishes in takedowns on the more famous Chilean poets; he belittles Neruda encouraging the reader to widen his/her ideas and knowledge of Chilean writing.
Pru interviews a 50 year old poetess: "to me Neruda, Huidobro, DeRokha, Lihn, and Zurita are like one single macho jackass, overblown and small dicked."
This is an engaging novel with a worthwhile theme that becomes better as it progresses. One cannot help thinking of Roberto Bolano as the story unfolds. Zambra is an exciting "younger" South American novelist whose earlier short story collection, My Documents, was also quite good.
On a more sober note when I finished the novel I could not think how the world would be a better place if more of us were poets, giving voice to our hopes, loves and disappointments. So be it.