"Ways of Going Home," Alejandro Zambra's third book to be published in English (and second translated by Megan McDowell), packs a lot of themes--historical memory, difficulties of love, honesty in art--into a brief 139 page novel taking place in the time between the two great Chilean earthquakes in 1985 and 2010. It's an ambitious project from one of Granta's "Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists," and one that is a bit of a mess. Before getting into the reasons why I think this book doesn't wo...

"Parents abandon their children. Children abandon their parents. Parents protect or forsake, but they always forsake. Children stay or go but they always go."

Alejandro Zambra's novella, Ways of Going Home, which was first published in 2011, was chosen for the stop in Chile on my Around the World in 80 Books challenge. I had originally decided that the novella would be the last stop on my reading journey, but I was so intrigued that I just had to pick it up earlier. This particular winner of the English Pen Award is set in Pinochet's Chile, circling around districts of the capital city, Santiago. This particular edition has been translated from its or...

another 3.5 stars. More later...I did like it, some great stuff about childhood, anecdotes about growing up under the Pinochet regime, and 20 years later coming to terms with having complicit parents. Lots of meta-fiction about writing this novel and asking his ex to read through it, and about cinema and his tastes and re-meeting a (girl) friend who, when young, asked him to spy on a neighbour. Some gentle observations in parks and restaurants (eg watching a woman read in a park: reading is cove...

“It’s strange, it’s silly to attempt a genuine story about something, about someone, about anyone, even oneself. But it’s necessary as well” I had just recently finished Karl Ove Knausgaard’s excellent biography/fiction work “My Struggle” that experiments with truth and memory when I came across this book. This book through its scant 160 pages seems obsessively intent on doubling and tripling down on the concept. Nominally set in Chile circa 1985, in the immediate aftermath of a large earthqua

"Instead of screaming, I write books" R. Gary This is a redemptive tribute to those who went missing during the Pinochet regime. To all those unknown names whose blood still runs through the veins of the silenced generation which was growing up during this elusive period in Chile.Zambra’s unpretentious voice gets irretrievably tangled with the one narrating the story, a nameless writer, who simultaneously mirrors his life through his characters, creating a perfecty circled metanarration, overflo...

Better than "The Private Lives of Trees." A fascinating exploration of the intersection between private memory and public history, the nature of storytelling, the self-delusions of love, and how the insidious Pinochet dictatorship subtly shaped the lives of several generations. 4.5 stars

Zambra does a masterful job in this novel giving voice of the experiences of a silent group in Chile -- the generation that grew up under Pinochet's rule, living their childhoods in the shadow of a brutal dictatorship. Zambra reveals the uneasy balance between children's worlds of games and school and friends and parental rules, on the one hand, and those moments when the adult reality of politics and fear and frustration and loss came in through the cracks. Adding a new twist, Zambra focuses pa...

first book in spanish 4 stars probably just cause i'm proud of myself

I was so enthralled by the language of this novel that I buttered my raisin bread with one hand because I couldn't put this book down for a second. easy to read in a single session and you will want to...maybe even with some raisin bread."do we really recognize someone twenty years later? can we recognize now, in some luminous sign, the definitive features irrevocably adult, of a bygone face? I've spent the afternoon thinking about that, deliberating that."once again without always being aware o...

Ways of Going Home tells two stories in four fleeting chapters. The first begins with an earthquake in 1984. The protagonist, unnamed, is nine years old (as was Zambra at that time). Augusto Pinochet had been in power for over ten years, since the coup d'état on September 11, 1973, and he would continue to be the dictator for six more.Much of Roberto Bolaño's fiction deals with Pinochet's time in power; indeed, Bolaño had personal confrontation with the regime: after the coup he was arrested on

I was browsing the "Short Reads" display at Waterstones, when a bookseller walked by, picked up this book, put it in front of me (while walking) and said "it's the best book in the pile, I love it, I've read it 10 times". It takes a lot to convince me, so here we are. Understand this. I had just abandoned The Shadow of the Wind, which was supposed to be this book-centered masterpiece, and, just, meh. Then I picked this up, and I was immediately gripped by it. The UK edition is only 139 pages, so...

The narrator struggles to speak truthfully about things that are too terrible, or too hidden, to be written about truthfully. This novel succeeds magnificently in turning that contradiction into art. The novel is from the point of view of a novelist trying to make sense of his childhood during the Pinochet years, and to come to terms with the choices that his parents and the other adults in his life made to survive those years. An excerpt: I'd spent the afternoon with a group of classmates, and

What a delightful novel “Ways of Going Home” by Alejandro Zambra is! I was reading it and smiling to myself constantly, rereading certain passages and loving it all. I adore the effortlessness of Zambra’s prose and the way he describes family dynamics - there is so much here between the lines.The structure of this slim novel is unusual. The first part is the book the protagonist (who may or may not be Zambra himself) writes and it talks about the childhood memories of a young boy. The second par...

This short novel of 138 pages moves about - between a writer and his own life and the life of his characters in his writing , between the present time and the past - a past in Chile during and after the Pinochet years. It represents not just the voice of the post revolution generation but of todays Latin American writers from the generation post Marquez. First there is the story of the young nameless boy and Claudia, the girl he adores, and her Uncle Raul, the boys neighbour. Then there is the s...

The best and the worst thing about a reading-the-world-challenge is that I often pick up a book simply because it is from a country I have not checked off my list.In the case of Alejandro Zambra's Ways of Going Home, I am glad that this challenge brought me to this peculiar book. The narrative seems to float like a piece of driftwood: it does not really have a plot except that everything just goes onwards while the narrator reflects on the past.What I liked was the blurring of voice within the n...

Jeffrey Keeten posted a review today of Too Late to Turn Back: Barbara and Graham Greene in Liberia which included a lengthy citation by the author Barbara Greene, speaking of her cousin Graham Greene. "Apart from three or four people he was really fond of, I felt that the rest of humanity was to him like a heap of insects that he liked to examine."I have digested that observation all day. Such was percolating as I finished Ways of Going Home. Zambra's wonderful novel reaches back to childhood,

This was the sweetest book I have read. If not ever for sure this year. I would love to mention a number of powerful quotes regarding our childhood memories, our relationship with our parents and our past but I don't want to have spoilers in my review so I will only quote this "Our parents were there for us to not be afraid. But we weren't afraid. They were the ones who were afraid."Last, this was a fictional novel that in my heart had the effect of poetry.

"There is a pain but also happiness when you give up on a book," Writes Alejandro Zambra on behalf of his protagonist, also a writer. I have not givin up on his little book. But I certainly felt both emotions when I finished reading. There is a promise in this novel and he definitely has got a lot of interesting thoughts. But he was trying to pull out some post modernist trick, and, I think, in this case the form prevailed over substance. He has tried to write a novel within a novel, but ended u...

This was a fantastic, short, terse and brief novel on the art of writing, being political and being authentic.I am amazed at the quality of this translation because it was so readable and well written in short simple sentences. Just beautiful prose.