{"id":1467,"date":"2014-02-16T14:45:21","date_gmt":"2014-02-16T18:45:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/students.com.miami.edu\/~reviewing\/?page_id=1467"},"modified":"2014-02-16T18:57:14","modified_gmt":"2014-02-16T22:57:14","slug":"ways-of-going-home-in-post-pinochet-chile","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/students.com.miami.edu\/reviewing\/?page_id=1467","title":{"rendered":"‘Ways of Going Home’ in 1980s Chile"},"content":{"rendered":"

Posted February 16, 2014<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

“Ways of Going Home”
\nBy Alejandro Zambra<\/p>\n

By KASSANDRA MEYER<\/p>\n

Alejandro Zambra\u2019s new novella, \u201cWays of Going\u00a0Home\u201d,<\/i> reads like in a short daydream \u2014 short <\/i>because the novella is only 139 pages long and a daydream<\/i> in that Zambra blurs the line between reality and fiction.\u00a0 Besides the brevity of the story, the work is brilliantly written.<\/p>\n

\"919cF8R6-JL-1._SL1500_\"<\/a>Set in 1980s Chile, in the early years of Pinochet\u2019s dictator regime, the story follows a nine-year-old boy in his attempt to win the affection of an older girl named Claudia.\u00a0 The later chapters captures the boy, now a young writer, living in post-Pinochet Chile, grappling to understand his childhood experience of vicarious terrorism, diluted by his infancy.<\/p>\n

Since the fall of Pinochet\u2019s regime in 1990, not many writers in fiction have captured the lives of Chileans during the oppressive rule.\u00a0 Only famed Chilean novelist Isabel Allende comes to mind. Still, Zambra’s work is poetic and fresh, borrowing techniques from Hemingway\u2019s simple narrative, Proust\u2019s involuntary memory, with his own dazzling nuance.<\/p>\n

At only 39 years old and two other books in his repertoire, \u201c<\/i>Bonsai\u201d <\/i>(2006) and \u201cThe Tree of Lives\u201d (2007),\u00a0 Zambra has been figured on Granta\u2019s list of best young Spanish\u00ad\u2014language novelists, and the Bogot\u00e139 project.\u00a0 For his third book, \u201cWays of Going Home\u201d, <\/i>Zambra produces his deepest achievement.<\/p>\n

Zambra grew up in Chile during the same time as the narrator, suggesting an autobiographical sensibility.\u00a0 But again, Zambra never makes the distinction and nor is that his purpose for writing the novella.\u00a0 The narrator is nameless, he is of no importance.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe novel belongs to our parents\u2026that\u2019s what we grew up believing, that the novel belonged to our parents.\u00a0 While the adults killed or were killed, we drew pictures in a corner. While the novel was happening, we played hide-and-seek, we played at disappearing,\u201d Zambra wrote.<\/p>\n

In the story, Zambra characterizes his generation as \u201csecondary characters\u201d who didn’t fully grasp the severity of the dictatorship.\u00a0 Every major character is a minor character. The protagonist thinks he is the hero of a love story with Claudia, but really he is a secondary character in a sadder drama.<\/p>\n

Likewise, the novelist\u2019s childhood in a suburb of Santiago now seems only minor in relation to the major and tragic events of Chile\u2019s recent past.\u00a0 The narrator felt protected within the streets of fictional names, \u201cI lived on Aladdin (Street), between Odin and Ramayana and parallel to Lemuria\u201d while Claudia lived \u201cin the neighborhood of real names \u2026 Lucila Godoy Alcayaga.\u201d<\/p>\n

The title itself, \u201cWays of Going Home\u201d, symbolically touches the different ways of understanding, remembering, and accepting with the disorienting history.\u00a0 While for the narrator’s parents’ generation this is silence \u2013 they are, like their homes at the time, “impregnable bastions” \u2013 he and his peers pick storytelling as an outlet for the past.<\/p>\n

Zambra splits his novel between our narrator and a fictional narrator of the former\u2019s creation; he tries to grasp the past via fiction.<\/p>\n

\u201dI’m waiting for a voice that isn’t mine \u2013 novelistic and solid,\u201d he wrote.\u00a0 He ultimately gives up on this fictional framing of real-life events, because it’s a story he’s already telling:\u00a0 “Although we might want to tell other people’s stories we always end up telling our own.\u201d\u00a0 Dealing with the Pinochet aftermath is then at the duty of the writer’s creative anguish about his calling to write.<\/p>\n

The style of alternating narrators may confuse readers, but it has a compelling effect.\u00a0 Zambra is a literary writer who experiments with literary techniques.\u00a0 He loves mentioning literary greats, Gustave Flaubert\u2019s \u201cMadame Brovary” and Marcel Proust\u2019s \u201cIn Search of Lost Time\u201d <\/i>in his works \u2014distinguishing the narrator\u2019s writing style and preferences.\u00a0 He aspires to not a good writer, but a great one.<\/p>\n

In his past novel, \u201cBonsai\u201d, he uses the same structure of novel written by the writer in the novel.\u00a0 The protagonist of \u201cBonsai\u201d, Juli\u00e1n, is writing something that seems very similar to Bonsai.\u00a0 <\/i>At the same time, he seems to want to write a novel that resembles \u201cWays of Going Home\u201d like the novelist in \u201cWays of Going Home\u201d,\u00a0<\/i> Juli\u00e1n also comes from a family where \u201cthere were no dead.\u201d His friends have tragic histories, but he does not.\u00a0 And so he imagines a future novel that would examine this condition of ignorance, or innocence.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe has definitely been wasting time with his fixation on bonsais. Now he thinks the only book that would be worth writing is a long story about those days of 1984. That would be the only permissible book, the only necessary one,\u201d Zambra wrote.<\/p>\n

A recurring theme in Zambra\u2019s stories is the journey of finding a voice and a story in a time where the protagonist doesn’t feel part of anything worth writing about.\u00a0 He starts goes into bonsais and failing relationships, but doesn’t feel the significance that would make him a \u2018great\u2019 writer.\u00a0 What Zambra fails to do, or subconsciously does, is realize that a dramatic plot driven story does not capture the reader, but his inner struggle to find his voice.<\/p>\n

\u201cWays of Going Home\u201d, c<\/i>omplex yet sophisticated, the novel places Zambra at the zenith of a new Chilean fiction that weaves some of the continent’s most difficult historical themes into an exciting modern art form.\u00a0 The novella is pricey at $14,\u00a0 however it is a collector\u2019s item \u2014 and a great addition to any serious reader\u2019s library.<\/p>\n