Chilean Poet

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A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
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 [is] one of the most brilliant Latin American writers of his generation.” —The New York Review of Books 

“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 bold and brilliant new work by one of the most important writers of our time.“Chilean Poet complicates the notion of an artistic birthright rooted in national identity . . . [it] treats the thorny topic of collective identity not as tragedy, but as a familial comedy. Its laughs are forged across languages . . . [such] that one happily loses track of any original.”
—New York Times Book Review

“[Zambra] mix[es] tenderness, depth and laugh-out-loud humor . . . [his] incursions into metafiction, in which the author peeks in and winks at the reader, feel playful, serendipitous. He’s clearly having fun.”
—Los Angeles Times

“[A] splendid book . . . Chilean Poet moves deftly among different points of view . . . [Vicente’s] complicated reunion with Gonzalo is one of the best endings to a novel that I have read in years, a scene of beautiful emotional improvisation.”
—Wall Street Journal

“[A] charming novel.”
—The New Yorker

“[A] picaresque, sprightly, contemporary version of a bildungsroman . . . startling and original . . . Just as Zambra’s characters turn to literature for hope, so I can now turn to Zambra. Born two years after the coup that destroyed democracy in Chile, he managed to survive the darkest days of our history and to emerge with an incandescent, comedic, compassionate view of humanity.”
—Ariel Dorfman, The New York Review of Books

“A fascinating portrait of a country at a turning point . . . It is a testament to Zambra’s skill that I can so readily imagine the continuation of Vicente’s life. It is also a testament to Chilean Poet’s hopefulness, which, while cautious, runs so deep that the book seems almost to have predicted [Gabriel] Boric’s victory.”
—The Atlantic

“Zambra’s fifth novel is in many ways a return to youth, the beauty, the unreliability, and the red-hot indignity of it . . . there are those signature Zambra sentences, those reckless, rambling sentences that proceed like sleepwalkers traversing the same crosswalk, heedless of traffic lights . . . this is fiction that provokes a need in you, a curiosity you wish to prolong by returning to it someday: crushing or euphoric emotions (love, regret, giving up, artistic passion) paired with everyday events (using a computer, quitting smoking) and packed in a miniature, highly constrained form . . . in many strange and enthralling ways [it] mature[s] as one reads it.”
—Bookforum

“Really funny, really sweet . . . an offbeat family story.” 
—NPR’s “Pop Culture Happy Hour”

“Hilarious, touching, and a phenomenal jumping off point for deepening your knowledge of Chilean poetry’s varied, mercurial characters, Chilean Poet dives into what families are, fathers and sons, and literary pretensions.”
—Electric Lit

“[H]eartfelt . . . Without a doubt, it is [Zambra’s] best work yet, generously infused with nostalgic tenderness, original humor, and Zambraesque storytelling vitality. Only a writer like Zambra—whose love for literature, insight into human vulnerability, and understanding of tumultuous history were expansively illustrated in his previous works—could have written Chilean Poet . . . emotionally resonant . . . both Zambra’s straightforward prose and his experimental poems all read naturally, thanks to McDowell’s astute translation.”
—Asymptote

“There are many joys of [Chilean Poet], including Zambra’s fascinating depiction of the Chilean literary scene, a lot of (purposefully) bad poetry, and all of the stylistic inventiveness and wonder that Zambra and acclaimed translator Megan McDowell are known for. A tender and brilliant novel that surprises at every turn, Chilean Poet is a poignant examination of family and art.”
—Book Riot

“The thing that has always made Zambra’s writing irresistible (to me, anyway) is his attention to the seemingly inconsequential matters that render our lives so flush with consequence. Chilean Poet will almost certainly amble along Zambra’s wonderfully original, laconic literary path.”
—Il’ja Rákoš, The Millions

“Zambra’s novels remain clever and poetic, never too serious, always affirming. This quality could be described as warmth, but I will call it inclusivity: Zambra’s novels will always accept us. They will not be bitter and they will not allow us to writhe in anguish. They will show us the pain of maturation and the pain of relationships, but they will lead us through these passages gently, with humor and compassion . . . Zambra ends novels better than anyone alive, and the ending to Chilean Poet is one of the most memorable a reader can experience.”
—Chicago Review of Books

“Zambra has earned a reputation as an autofiction alchemist, an artist who does not simply notate the numbing details of daily life but spins the quotidian into art. In his latest novel, Chilean Poet, he writes in a different, grander register . . . we encounter scenarios that are recognizable because we have experienced them before, yet he depicts them with such care and irreverence that they are rendered unfamiliar.”
—Vulture

“[A] brilliant poetical novel . . . [Zambra] brilliantly coax[es] his readers in each of the novel’s four parts to believe his frequently hilarious tales . . . a novelistic epigone but primarily a charming, very rare, and disconcerting tribute to the poet’s vocation; a poignant settling of scores.” 
—World Literature Today

“Megan McDowell has mastered [Zambra’s] predominant tone of droll melancholy right along with him.” 
—4Columns

“Megan McDowell’s ability to capture the novel’s Chilenismos beyond the usual linguistic chasms between English and Spanish is a remarkable achievement . . . Zambra strikes a perfect balance of self-aware yet sincere. He reaches the sublime through descriptions of everyday routine. He never takes himself too seriously while acknowledging the gravity of introducing a child to the world in all its glorious contradictions . . . Chilean Poet takes readers on a courageous journey of invention.” 
—PopMatters

“A very funny, warm, and beautiful novel.” 
—Sheila Heti, author of Pure Colour

“Every beat and pattern of being alive becomes revelatory and bright when narrated by Alejandro Zambra. He is a modern wonder.”
—Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch

“His clever irony, his lighthearted yet powerful prose, his gift for capturing this life that passes through and yet still escapes us—everything Zambra has already put into practice in his novellas and short stories explodes with vitality in Chilean Poet. Contemporary, beautiful, brilliant.”
—Samanta Schweblin, author of Fever Dream

“A playful, discursive novel about families, relationships, poetry, and how easily all three can come together or fall apart . . . [Chilean Poet] renders both the small moments of literary striving and the everyday difficulties of being part of, and raising, a family with an insight that’s both cleareyed and tender.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“There’s no questioning Zambra’s deep affection for writers grasping at love.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Intelligent and funny and moving and profound. . . It’s been a long time since I’ve laughed so hard or been so moved by a novel.”
—Rodrigo Fresán, Letras Libres
 
“Engaging . . . written with a simplicity and freedom . . . The final part is wonderful, almost miraculous, masterly.”
—Ignacio Echevarría, El Mundo
 
“Chilean Poet reminds us, in sum, of ‘life’s complexity’…It has moved me and made me laugh a lot. This is a great Zambra.”
—Nadal Suau, El Mundo
 
“[An] intelligent and moving novel . . . jaunty and ironic but never lacking in tenderness.”
—Jorge Carrión, New York Times en Español, “Best Spanish-Language Books of 2020”

PRAISE FOR ALEJANDRO ZAMBRA

“The most talked-about writer to come out of Chile since Bolaño.”
—The New York Times Book Review
 
“Zambra’s books have long shown him to be a writer who, at the sentence level, is in a world all his own.”
—NPR.org

“Strikingly original.”
—James Wood, The New Yorker

“One of the most interesting writers working right now.”
—Elle.com

“When I read Zambra I feel like someone’s shooting fireworks inside my head.”
—Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive

“Zambra is so alert to the intimate beauty and mystery of being alive that in his hands a raindrop would feel as wide as a world.”
—Anthony Marra, author of The Tsar of Love and TechnoAlejandro Zambra is the author of ten books, including Multiple Choice; Bonsai; The Private Lives of Trees; and My Documents, a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. The recipient of numerous literary prizes, as well as a New York Public Library Cullman Center fellowship, his stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Harper’s Magazine, among other publications. He lives in Mexico City. 

Megan McDowell (translator) is the recipient of a 2020 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been short- or long-listed four times for the International Booker Prize. She lives in Santiago, Chile.

Those were the days of apprehensive mothers, of taciturn fathers, and of burly older brothers, but they were also the days of blankets, of quilts, and of ponchos, and so no one thought it strange that Carla and Gonzalo would spend two or three hours every evening curled up on the sofa beneath a magnificent red poncho made of ChiloŽ wool that, in the freezing winter of 1991, seemed like a basic necessity.

 

In spite of all the obstacles, the poncho strategy allowed Carla and Gonzalo to do practically everything, except for the famous, the sacred, the much feared and longed-for penetration. Carla’s mother’s strategy, meanwhile, was to feign the absence of a strategy. At most she would occasionally ask them, trying to chip away at their confidence with almost imperceptible irony, if perhaps they weren’t a little warmish, and they would reply in unison, their voices faltering like a couple of terrible acting students, that no, in fact, it really is freezing cold in here.

 

Then Carla’s mother would disappear down the hall and turn her attention back to the TV drama she was watching in her room, on mute-the TV in the living room was loud enough, because Carla and Gonzalo were watching the same show, which they weren’t all that interested in, but the unspoken rules of the game stipulated that they had to pay attention, if only so they could respond naturally to Carla’s mother’s comments when she reappeared in the living room, at uncertain and not necessarily frequent intervals, to arrange flowers in a vase or fold napkins or carry out some other task of questionable urgency. Then she would glance sidelong toward the sofa, not so much to look at them as to make them feel that she could see them, and she’d slip in phrases like, Well, she was pretty much asking for it, or That guy’s a few cards short of a deck, and then Carla and Gonzalo, always in unison and scared stiff, practically naked under the poncho, would answer, Yeah, or Totally, or She’s so in love.

 

Carla’s intimidating older brother-who did not play rugby, but whose size and demeanor could easily have gotten him drafted to the national team-usually came home after midnight, and the rare times he arrived earlier he locked himself in his room to play Double Dragon, though there was still the risk he would come downstairs for a salami sandwich or a glass of Coke. Luckily, when that happened Carla and Gonzalo could count on the miraculous help of the staircase, in particular the second-or penultimate-step: from the moment they heard its strident creak until the instant the older brother landed in the living room exactly six seconds went by, which was long enough for them to get situated under the poncho so they looked like two innocent strangers weathering the cold together out of simple solidarity.

 

The futuristic theme song of the evening news marked, every night, the end of the session: the couple would go to the front yard and play out a passionate goodbye that sometimes coincided with the arrival of Carla’s father, who would flash the Toyota’s headlights and rev its engine, either as a greeting or as a threat.

 

“This little romance is lasting a bit too long, if you ask me,” he would add with an arch of his eyebrow, if he was in a good mood.

 

 

The bus ride from La Reina to Plaza de Maipœ took over an hour, which Gonzalo spent reading, though it was hard in the dim light of the streetlamps, and sometimes he had to content himself with catching a glimpse of a poem when the bus stopped on an illuminated corner. He was scolded every night for coming home late, and every night Gonzalo swore, without the slightest intention of keeping his word, that from then on he would come home earlier. He went to sleep thinking about Carla, and when he couldnÕt sleep, as often happened, he thought about her and he masturbated.

 

To masturbate while thinking about one’s beloved is, as we all know, the most ardent proof of fidelity, especially if one jacks off to fantasies that are, as a movie trailer might put it, based on a true story: far from getting lost in unlikely scenarios, Gonzalo pictured them on the same sofa as always, covered by the same chilote poncho as always, and the only difference, the only fictional element, was that they were alone, and then he entered her and she embraced him and delicately closed her eyes.

 

The surveillance system seemed inviolable, but Carla and Gonzalo trusted that their opportunity would soon present itself. It happened toward the end of spring, right when the stupid warm weather was threatening to ruin everything. A screeching of brakes and a chorus of howls interrupted the eight o’clock calm-a Mormon missionary had been hit on the corner, and Carla’s mom hightailed it outside to gossip, and Carla and Gonzalo understood that the moment they’d yearned for had arrived. Counting the thirty seconds the penetration lasted and the three and a half minutes they spent cleaning up the drops of blood and assimilating the insipid experience, the entire process took a mere four minutes, after which Carla and Gonzalo went, without further ado, to join the crowd of curious onlookers gathered around the blond youth who lay on the sidewalk beside his mangled bike.

 

If the blond boy had died and Carla had gotten pregnant, we would be talking about a slight tipping of the world’s scales in favor of brown people, because any child of Carla’s, who was pretty dark, with even darker Gonzalo, could hardly have turned out blond, but none of that happened: the incident left the Mormon with a limp and Carla withdrawn, so sore and sad that for two weeks, making ridiculous excuses, she refused to see Gonzalo. And when she finally did, it was only to break up with him “face-to-face.”

 

In Gonzalo’s defense it must be said that information was scarce in those wretched years, with no help from parents or advice from teachers or guidance counselors, and without any assistance from governmental campaigns or anything like that, because the country was too worried about keeping the recently recovered and still shaky democracy afloat to think about such sophisticated First World issues as an integrated policy on sex education. Suddenly freed from the dictatorship of their childhoods, Chilean teenagers were living through their own parallel transitions into adulthood, smoking weed and listening to Silvio Rodr’guez or Los Tres or Nirvana while they deciphered or tried to decipher all kinds of fears, frustrations, traumas, and problems, almost always through the dangerous method of trial and error.

 

Back then, of course, you didn’t have billions of online videos promoting a marathon idea of sex; while Gonzalo had seen publications like Bravo or Quirquincho, and had once or twice “read,” let’s say, a Playboy or a Penthouse, he had never seen a porno, and as such had no audiovisual material that would help him understand that, any way you looked at it, his performance had been disastrous. His whole idea of what should happen in bed was based on his ponchoistic practice sessions and on the boastful, vague, and fantastical stories he heard from some of his classmates.

 

 

Surprised and devastated, Gonzalo did everything he could to get back together with Carla, although everything he could do amounted only to calling her every half hour and wasting his time on the fruitless lobbying of a couple of duplicitous intermediaries who had no intention of helping him, because, sure, they thought he was smart, kinda cute in his own way, and funny, but compared to CarlaÕs countless other suitors they found him lacking, a weirdo outsider from the periphery that was Maipœ.

 

Gonzalo had no other option than to go all in on poetry: he locked himself in his room and in a mere five days produced forty-two sonnets, moved by the Nerudian hope of managing to write something so extraordinarily persuasive that Carla could not go on rejecting him. At times he forgot his sadness; at least for a few minutes, the intellectual exercise of fixing a crooked verse or finding a rhyme took precedence. But then the joy of an image he found masterly would be crushed under the weight of his bitter present.

 

Unfortunately, none of those forty-two compositions held genuine poetry. One example is this completely unmemorable sonnet that must nevertheless be among the five best-or the five least bad-of the series:

 

The telephone is red as is the sun

 

I couldn’t sleep, was waiting for your call

 

I look and look for you but find no one

 

I’m like a zombie walking through this mall

 

I’m like a pisco sour sans alcohol

 

I’m like a lost and twisted cigarette

 

Ne’er to be smoked, this treacherous Pall Mall

 

Abandoned in the street so sad and wet

 

I’m like a wilted flower in a book

 

I’m like a threaded screw without a drill

 

A dead dog sprawled beside the road-don’t look

 

But I’m just like that sorry-ass roadkill

 

Everything hurts, from feet to face to eye

 

And nothing’s certain but that I will die

 

The only presumable virtue of the poem was its forced adherence to the classical form, which for a sixteen-year-old could be considered praiseworthy. The final stanza was, by far, the worst part of the sonnet, but also the most authentic, because, in his lukewarm and oblique way, Gonzalo did feel like he wanted to die. There’s nothing funny about mocking his feelings; let us instead mock the poem, its obvious and mediocre rhymes, its schmaltz, its involuntary humor. But let us not underestimate Gonzalo’s pain, which was real.

 

While Gonzalo was battling tears and iambic pentameter, Carla was listening over and over to “Losing My Religion” by R.E.M., a contemporary hit that she claimed perfectly summed up her state of mind, though she only understood a few of the English words (life, you, me, much, this), plus the title, which she connected with the idea of sin, as if the song were really called “Losing My Virginity.” Though she did go to Catholic school, her torment was not religious or metaphysical, but rather absolutely physical, because, all symbolism and shame aside, penetration had hurt like hell: the very same penis she used to furtively, happily put in her mouth, the same one she stroked daily and pretty creatively, now seemed to her like a brutal, deceitful power drill.

 

“No one is ever going to put another one of those in me, never. Not Gonza or anyone else,” she told her girlfriends, who visited her every day, contrary to what Carla herself wanted; she proclaimed to the four winds that she wanted to be left alone, but they still kept showing up.

 

Carla’s girlfriends could be divided into two camps: the angelical, boring, and larger group of those who were still virgins, and the scant motley crew of those who were not. The virginal group was divided, in turn, into the smaller subset of those who wanted to wait until marriage, and the bigger, more fickle subset of the not yets, to which Carla had belonged until recently. Among the non-virgins, two in particular really stood out, and Carla referred to them, with irony and admiration, as “the leftists,” because they were, in nearly every sense, more radical or maybe just less repressed than anyone else Carla knew. (One of them insisted Carla change her favorite song, since she felt that the Divinyls song “I Touch Myself,” also a hit in those days, was more appropriate to the current situation than “Losing My Religion.” “You don’t choose your favorite song,” replied Carla, right as rain.)

 

 

After considering the abundant advice from both sides and giving special preference to the opinions of the leftists, Carla decided that actually, the most reasonable thing was to erase her first sexual experience as soon as possible, for which purpose she logically, urgently, needed a second one. On a Friday after school she called Gonzalo and asked him to meet her downtown. He was beside himself with joy: he ran out to the bus stop, which was very unusual for him, because he thought people who ran in the street looked ridiculous, especially when they were wearing long pants. The bus he caught had no empty seats, but even standing he still managed to reread a good number of the forty-two poems heÕd brought with him in his backpack.

 

Carla greeted him with an eloquent smack on the lips and told him, straight up, that she wanted to get back together and she wanted to go to a motel, which was something she herself had refused to do for almost an entire year, alleging indecency, lack of money, illegality, bacteriophobia, or all of the above. But now she assured him, in a somewhat exaggeratedly sensual tone, that she did want to, that she was dying to go.

 

“I heard there’s one near the craft market and I got some condoms and I have the money,” said Carla in a single rapid-fire phrase. “Let’s go!”

 

The place was a sordid hole-in-the-wall that smelled of incense and reheated grease, because you could order fried cheese or meat empanadas delivered to the room, as well as beers, pichuncho cocktails, or pisco and Cokes, all options that they refused. A woman with dyed-red hair and blue-painted lips took their money and of course did not ask for ID. As soon as they closed the door to the tiny room, Carla and Gonzalo took off their clothes and looked at each other in astonishment, as if they had just discovered nudity, which in a way they had. For some five minutes they limited themselves to kissing, licking, and biting, and then Carla herself put the condom on Gonzalo-she’d practiced on a corncob that very morning-and he slowly slid inside her with the restraint and emotion appropriate in a person who wants to treasure the moment, and everything seemed to be going swimmingly, but in the end there wasn’t much improvement, because the pain persisted (in fact, it hurt Carla even worse than the first time), and the penetration lasted about as long as it would take a hundred-meter sprinter to run the first fifty meters.

 

Gonzalo half opened the blinds to look at the people heading home from work with a slowness that seemed fantastical from afar. Then he knelt down beside the bed and looked very closely at Carla’s feet. He had never before noticed that feet had lines, that there were lines on the soles of feet: for a full minute, as if he were trying to solve a maze, he followed those chaotic lines that branched into invisibility and thought about writing a long poem about someone who walks barefoot along an endless path until the lines on their feet are completely erased. Then he lay down beside Carla and asked if he could read her his sonnets.

US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.7800 × 5.4500 × 8.3600 in
Imprint	Penguin Books
ISBN-13	09780143109204
ISBN-10	0143109200
Author	Alejandro Zambra, Megan McDowell
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	FIC045000, FIC019000
Subjects	megan mcdowell, santiago, blended families, fiction books, realistic fiction books, hispanic books, latino fiction, hispanic fiction, roberto bolano, pablo neruda, spanish translation, stepfamily, chilean poet alejandro zambra, chilean poet zambra, chilean poets, alejandro zambra, zambra, multiple choice, spanish novels, latinx, parenthood, family, FIC045000, fiction, coming of age, FIC019000, realistic fiction, novels, poetry, Literature, latinx books, latino, chile, family life, literary fiction, love stories, latin american, bestselling books