The new book by the national writer Alejandro Zambra in a text crossed by tenderness, and by family anecdotes that could be that of any Chilean family of the 1980s or Latin American family of our century, and where there is great care with the language and with the diligent and challenging frankness, which involves stirring the vernacular memory.
By Alfonso Matus Holy Cross
Published on 8.9.2023
RI remember that reading Zambra’s first two novels, Bonsai y The private life of treesthey gave me an impression that was part perplexity, part tedium, beyond the sparks of humor and the finished texture of the prose, the stories hit, but did not engage, they were oblique and sad.
Perhaps I read it when sadness was no longer an option for me, when adolescence had already been immolated due to early parenthood, which came to shake the table and recalibrate my life perspective due to force majeure.
I read it with the suspicion of aspiring writers, perhaps of the poet who distrusts prose writers who abandoned the muses because of the wide readership and possibility of some commercial benefit that narrative provides.
All in all, the truth is that there is no compelling reason to resist a particular writer beyond the fact that their books do not enter us like the sound of rain or the light of dawn. The styling of the early Zambra appealed to me, but I didn’t love it.
That changed completely with the reading of his readings, his writing about reading in Do not readand his stories, Ways to return home.
I felt him closer, more settled, not only with a great mastery of language (or at least a certain insight, an awareness of the untranslatable and wonderful ambiguity that runs through life and literature), but reconciled with his memory and leaving his sense of humor emerges, the one that when you read it you seem to hear it as if you were hearing the latest story or the carvings of an unexpected friend.
A secret form of the company
It is with these precedents that I arrived with willingness and curiosity to read Children’s literature, his latest book, published a few months ago by Anagrama, as is already recurring. As has been said in some other parts, the book is a kind of long letter to the son, but it is also an open letter, and an intimate correspondence, with fragments of telephone calls from the Mexican City to Santiago, between Zambra and his father, or more good between Silvestre, Alejandro’s son, and his grandfather with Zambra as a strain.
Conversations that the writer filters in search of the memory of his father, of the assault they experienced together or the remembrance of some summers in a tent in which his father fished and Zambra read novels or threw the carving with a friend invited to the family vacation.
This occurs especially in the second part of the text, where the game of memory takes the lead from the game of intimacy, joy and astonishing uncertainty of the first part, in which Zambra articulates various essays and stories about his relationship with his child as he grows, from birth until he begins to read on his own.
The situation is conducive to rediscovering the circulatory system of literary passion, the ingenuity that beats in the first adventures with the language of a child who jokes with a newly invented book that he titles Alexander’s problemsfrom his pressing migraines, causing his mother and grandfather to laugh.
And all this happens with the mandatory confinement caused by the ghost of the pandemic, the intense coexistence that some of us had to have with children who had just learned to run and name things in the world, to recognize jokes and invent their own jokes and stories. to justify the passage of time, so that recess was eternal and not the suffocation of the outside environment.
That backdrop is overcome by family happiness and by the investigation into children’s literature, into the apparently simple enigmas communicated by some of those illustrated books that children sometimes learn by heart and ask us to reread with more enthusiasm than we do at the time. try to reread a story by Cortazar or a novel by Dostoevsky.
The reflections with which Zambra plays are born partly from his paternal experience, partly from his literary experience and the dialogue with those dead friends such as Nabokov, Valery or Mishima. But also with authors of children’s literature or thinkers about childhood and the colloquial and suspicious knowledge that codifies the word children as an insult by cynics who live divorced from the child they were.
It is a book crossed by tenderness, by family anecdotes that could be that of any Chilean family of the 80s or Latin American family of our century. There is great care with language and with the diligent and challenging frankness that involves stirring filial memory.
My friend Roberto told me an anecdote that tells us something about this Zambra father and writer. At the end of last year he worked in a bookstore and cafeteria in Ñuñoa where Zambra arrived one morning to talk with a friend in a state of apparent hangover or late night. My friend attended to them, I assume with the diligence and monastic kindness that he usually expresses, and at some point the author commented to him that he felt that he was not taking care of them, that he was “taking care of them.”
That day Zambra bought several books of children’s literature. He was probably finishing the book, taking advantage of his time in Chile before returning to Mexico and concluding a warm, insightful work, full of humor and a boldness that doubts and finds, loses and plays, weaves and unweaves memory and literary mechanisms, until provoke something in us, perhaps a memory, perhaps the joy of that type of reading that is not only pleasure, but also a secret form of company, a rare kind of intimacy between strangers who belong to a family willing to reconcile with parents and the dead, the children can enjoy and rediscover the mystery of a child’s words and games.
***
Alfonso Matus Holy Cross (1995) is a self-taught poet and writer, who after graduating from the Scuola Italiana Vittorio Montiglio in Santiago ventured into sociology and philosophy at the University of Chile, and then traveled throughout the southern cone performing various jobs, including which include the waiter, the barista and the forestry brigadier.
He currently resides in the city of Puerto Varas, and has just published his first collection of poems, titled cut silences (Notebook Poiesis, 2021). Likewise, he is a permanent editor of the Diario Cinema and Literature.
“Children’s Literature”, by Alejandro Zambra (Editorial Anagrama, 2023)
Alfonso Matus Holy Cross
Outstanding image: Alejandro Zambra.
2023-09-10 23:38:59
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