But this seemingly lackluster structure doesn’t matter because the book is filled with moments that made my heart sink déjà vu-inducing sinkholes sucking me back to my own childhood, my own adolescence. They left me too overwhelmed to go on reading. And it is in these moments that the magic of this book lies. Ways was not a great read because of what happened but because of the emotions it evoked.

As in his first book Bonsai, Zambra uses the same setup—the narrator is a writer living by himself, smoking cigarettes, sleeping with girls, trying to write a novel. While Ways visits the same points, it’s not to tell the same story. In life, one can sit around smoking cigarettes from day to day and yet the story, the ground situation, keeps changing.

Ways starts by focusing on the naiveté of youth, showing the narrator, as a nine-year-old, agreeing to spy on his neighbor because 12-year-old Claudia asked him too. But he’s still too young to even understand that this is a crush or even what a crush is. The spying leads the nine-year-old to trail a mysterious woman by bus. Here, Zambra nails the excitement of this first trip away from the parents’ house. The scene is loaded with nervous energy—the not knowing how to get home, but not really caring either. He allows this moment to play out to a surprising end. The nine-year-old starts pretending to be retarded so that the woman doesn’t catch on to him. But when he gets off the bus, she is there waiting, helping him to climb down. The woman then continues to help him trail her, by looking back and making sure he doesn’t get lost. In this scene, Zambra hooks the reader with a memory that we share and then tacks on a fantastical ending.

Alejandro Zambra

Another beautiful moment occurs during a family trip. The nine year old accidentally erases the chorus of a song on one of his family’s cassettes. He tries to cover up the crime by recording himself singing over the empty space. Zambra captures another childhood feeling: a small offense committed accidentally, followed by a disproportionate fear of punishment; just a child’s learning how to be in the world. Moments like these reach down into the reader’s soul and dig up memories long forgotten.

But children become grownups and grownups smoke and drink; grownups make mistakes and come to regret the things they’ve done and they try their best to live with it. Grownups hit the age their parents were when they had them, and they compare their own experience to the memory of their parents. They realize that their parents were never invincible and that they never really knew what they were doing. Then they compare that to what their parents are like now. During a dinner scene with his father, the narrator thinks to himself: “At what moment…did my father turn into this? Or was he always like this?” In the end, that taste of disgust and superiority is fleeting. Even though you can say words with what you think is true conviction and make love to another with what you think is true passion, you’re always fooling yourself at least a little bit. No one, in life, can be the hero who we read about in fiction. Zambra’s writing conveys the sense that much of life is spent acrossing the street with our eyes closed. Eventually, we all get a little bit fucked up.

Set in present-day Chile, Ways flashes back to the mid-80s, when Pinochet’s dictatorship was still in control. Zambra deals with this subject matter with an I-was-too-young-to-remember outlook. The narrator is part of a Chilean generation that is only now getting to the age their parents were when Pinochet was in charge.

In one of the more overtly political passages, Zambra writes: “While the adults killed or were killed, we drew pictures in a corner. While the country was falling to pieces, we were learning to talk, to walk, to fold napkins in the shape of boats, of airplanes. While the novel was happening, we played hide-and-seek, we played at disappearing.” Although this section ends on a serious, somber note, it is immediately undercut by what follows; a generous line break and the start of a new section: “Instead of writing, I spend the morning drinking beer and reading Madame Bovary.” It is a complex and subtle way to deal with the legacy of the dictatorship. Zambra knows that he cannot ignore the subject, but he also cannot do it justice. That story, that “novel,” was the job of his parents’ generation to write. The “we” of Zambra’s generation were just kids and, truth be told, they were barely aware of what was happening.

However, while the novel’s backdrop is political, its main focus is reflection and trying to understand one’s life. The narrator is a writer whose wife has left him. The book that he’s working on isn’t going well. Ways starts with him thinking back to that first crush, Claudia, and flows out from there; shifting temporally until Claudia comes along in the present. For a time, they make a new story together, all the while, looking back at what happened when they were kids and trying to understand it. Early on, the narrator says, “Sometimes I think I’m writing this book just to remember those conversations.” He seems to be looking into the past for a clue to why his marriage failed, for the formative seed of his failures with women. He uses the story that Claudia tells as a launching off point for his book, which is probably a book a lot like Ways, like two mirrors pointed at each other.

On the back cover, Nicole Krauss blurbed Zambra’s writing as “a phone call in the middle of the night from an old friend.” I felt the same and was gladdened to see that I was not alone. Reading Ways felt like listening to Zambra on the phone, trying to explain something to me. Not for my sake, but for his own. Trying to figure something out. Trying to look closer, understand the meaning of a pattern he’s just noticed. I swear that I felt this way long before I got to the end, where Zambra writes: “Today my friend Pablo called me so he could read me this phrase he found in a book by Tim O’Brien: ‘What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end.’ I kept thinking about that and stayed awake all night.” It is these “odd little fragments,” the little moments that Zambra captures, that lead the reader down emotional pathways he’d forgotten and that make this novel great.

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Daniel Alarcón is author of the story collection War by Candlelight and the novel Lost City Radio. He is Associate Editor of Etiqueta Negra, a quarterly published in his native Lima, Peru, and a Contributing Editor to Granta. He was recently named one of The New Yorker’s 20 under Forty, and his fiction, journalism, and translations have appeared in A Public Space, El País, McSweeney’s, n+1, and Harper’s. Alarcón lives in Oakland, California, where he is a Visiting Scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies.

***

The Rumpus: Tell me about Radio Ambulante. How did this project get started?

Daniel Alarcón: In late 2007, I was asked by the BBC to host a documentary about Andean migration to Lima. Naturally, I was intrigued. I come from a radio family, had just published a novel about radio, and the opportunity seemed frankly too good to be true. They sent a great producer from London who took care of the recording, and left me to do the interviews and the narration. I’d just come off a year of book tour, where you read the same text every night, and answer mostly the same questions. I felt my brain had turned off some time in mid-June, but then, doing this radio piece, I suddenly felt like I was thinking again. It was amazing. We spent ten days recording, and I loved every minute of it. But then the audio was mixed down and edited in London without my involvement, and when the final piece was aired, I felt a lot of the most interesting voices had been left out. We’d done interviews in both Spanish and English, and the English speakers got more time. This makes sense from an aesthetic point of view—of course the BBC couldn’t have 45 minutes of voiceovers on the air—it’s just that how do you tell the story of Latin American migration without Spanish speakers? That experience left me thinking about the need for a Spanish language space to tell Latin American stories.

Rumpus: One of your goals is to “tell stories that can only be told in Spanish.” What does this mean for you? There is a lack of this kind of journalism in the Spanish-speaking world, and I also wonder what this means at the level of language and culture.

Alarcón: I’m referring to stories that are by and for Latin Americans, where a certain amount of cultural fluency is expected, where we can delight in the details, the humor, the particularities of speech, of dialects. Something is always lost in translation; we know instinctively that this is the case. A Radio Ambulante story looks at Latin America from the inside.

A lot of attention has been paid in Latin America to the new generation of nonfiction writers, authors like Julio Villanueva Chang, Diego Osorno, Cristóbal Peña, Gabriela Wiener, Leila Guerriero, Cristian Alarcón, among others. These are writers doing important, groundbreaking work. So the talent is there, as is the habit of radio listenership, and what we propose to do is unite the two. We want to have these immensely gifted journalists—men and women who’ve already revitalized the long-form narrative—we want them to tell their stories in sound.

Rumpus: Radio Ambulante brings up some issues of translation. I often wonder if I’m missing anything in a translation. Alejandro Zambra is one of my favorite writers, yet I’ve only read him in English. I’d love to know what goes into translation, especially with fiction, which isn’t just pure content, but style as well. Have you discovered anything in your work that simply can’t be translated?

Alarcón: You’re right, of course: meaning can be usually be approximated, but often by sacrificing style. When I review my translations into Spanish, that’s what I’m most concerned with, reading the sentences aloud in Spanish to make sure they sound the way I want them to. To be honest, I much prefer being translated into Greek or Japanese; in those cases, you have no way of being involved, and no pressure.

Still, I’m a believer in the benefits of translation. It’s a necessity and a privilege—it would be awful to be limited to reading authors who’s work was composed in the languages I happen to have learned.

Rumpus: It looks like you’ll have audio in English at some point too?

Alarcón: Yeah, though we’re still working out how that can be done. We’re producing a bonus track in English for every episode—beginning with a great piece by producer Annie Murphy, but there’s a philosophical as well as aesthetic question that has to be answered: if Radio Ambulante is a Spanish language podcast, what does a Radio Ambulante story in English sound like? How would a Radio Ambulante story in English be different from a similar story produced by This American Life or The Moth or Snap Judgment?

Annie Correal reporting in NYC

Rumpus: Because Radio Ambulante covers stories from all over Latin America and the United States, I wonder if you see any regional differences in the kinds of stories you produce? Any particular cultural influences that you’ve seen in any of the individual countries? Or are there commonalities?

Alarcón: We begin from the premise that the United States, with 55 million Spanish speakers, is a Latin American country. And to be quite honest, those cultural differences you’re talking about are part of what I find so exciting about this project. I want to hear the diverse accents of Spanish as it is spoken across the Americas. I want to hear those stories that challenge and complicate accepted notions of what Latin America is. We’re working on pieces about the Jewish community in Guatemala, about Mexico City’s best gay soccer team, about a Colombian shaman caught up in a scandal because he couldn’t make it stop raining. The stories we’re looking for are both very specific and completely universal. Of course there will be cultural differences between a story from say, Cuba and a story from Bolivia, but that’s fine. It’s wonderful, in fact.

Rumpus: You mention stories being both very specific and completely universal. The first episode is all about “moving.” Migration, exile, and travel, which seem like completely universal things. Yet we all have very specific, unique stories about moving. How did this theme come together? Will all the episodes have themes?

Alarcón: We wanted to launch with a theme that everyone could understand and relate to, and stories started coming in that were all based on the idea of a move. All of our episodes will have a theme.

Rumpus: I noticed that you’re also featuring fiction writers on the site! This is such a great addition to the journalism.

Alarcón: Thanks! Yeah, it’s something we all agreed is important to the concept of Radio Ambulante. We are journalists, and we are storytellers, and we don’t see that there is a contradiction there. And of course, as a novelist myself, I was committed to the idea of including the voices of the writers I admire. I’m hoping we can someday put out the Radio Ambulante Anthology of Latin American Fiction, in print in both English and Spanish, and as an audio book in Spanish. That would be really exciting, and a fun way to get new voices out there.

Rumpus: Aside from reminding me how rusty my Spanish is, listening to Yuri Herrera read from his novel reminded me how writing is so tied into sound. The element of the human voice feels so essential here, and being able to hear someone speak (as opposed to hearing our own voice in our heads when we read) feels like a more elemental kind of storytelling. More like having a conversation.

Alarcón: That’s what’s great about radio, or at least about the kind of radio we propose to do. It can be almost like a conversation, that intimate, that personal.

Daniel Alarcón and Gabriela Wiener

Rumpus: You’ve written about radio before in your novel Lost City Radio. What is it about radio that you find compelling? What can radio do that a book can’t do?

Alarcón: Radio is the medium that most closely approximates the experience of reading. As a novelist, I find it very exciting to be able to reach people who might not ever pick up one of my books, either because they can’t afford it (as is often the case in Latin America), or because they just don’t have the habit of reading novels. Radio, or at least the kind of radio we’re proposing to do, can cut through that. It can reach people who would otherwise never hear your work, and of course I find that very notion inspiring. Radio stories are powerful because the human voice is powerful. It has been and will continue to be the most basic element of storytelling. As a novelist (and I should note that working my novel is the first thing I do in the morning and the very last thing I do before I sleep), shifting into this new medium is entirely logical. It’s still narrative, only with different tools.

Rumpus: What have you been reading lately? What Latin American writers should we be reading?

Alarcón: Patricio Pron and Samanta Schweblin of Argentina, Alejandro Zambra and Cristian Alarcón of Chile, Marco Aviles and Gabriela Wiener of Peru, Yuri Herrera, Diego Osorno, and Guadalupe Nettel of Mexico, just to name a few.

***

For those of you in Los Angeles, make sure to mark your calendar for June 26th! Radio Ambulante will have a live presentation at the Mark Taper Auditorium.

Radio Ambulante: Stories from the Americas: Daniel Alarcón with producers Annie Murphy, Nancy López, Ruxandra Guidi, and Martina Castro: In bilingual conversation with Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, Arts and Education reporter, KPCC 89.3 FM For full details go: here

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The Queen of Flash Fiction — A review of Pretty, a collection by Kim Chinquee.

A review of The Private Lives of Trees, a novella by Alejandro Zambra.

Time Loops, Child Molesters, And Sparkly  Tube Tops — A review of I Have to Go Back To 1994 and Kill a Girl, poetry by Karyna McGlynn.

A review of O Fallen Angel, a novel by Kate Zambreno.

Also, be sure not to miss Generation Gap #4: Sexting in the 21st Century and an essay on Walt Whitman’s favorite bar.

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Alejandro Zambra is the rare Latin American writer to have his work translated into English while not only living, but young. His short novel Bonsai came out in 2008 as part of Melville House’s “Art of the Contemporary Novella” series. After receiving awards in his native Chile; being named to the Bogotá 39, a list of the most important Latin American writers under 39; and making it to the shortlist of the 2008 Best Translated Book Award alongside Roberto Bolaño and Horacio Castellanos Moya, Zambra seemed destined to disappoint with his second work of fiction. He does not.

The Private Lives of Trees uses the same minimalist, metafictional style that so blew critics away in Bonsai, but to different effect. Whereas Zambra’s first novel used these techniques to highlight the detachment and deceptions of its pretentious characters, in Private Lives he playfully tells a story with much more emotional resonance.

Julian—professor, writer, husband to Veronica, and stepfather to 8-year-old Daniela—is trying to put his step-daughter to bed with a story about trees that can speak to each other after dark. Veronica should have already arrived home from her drawing class, but as the narrator informs us, this novel is defined by her absence:

It would be better to close the book, close the books, and to face, all at once, not life, which is very big, but the fragile armor of the present. For now, the story goes on and Veronica hasn’t arrived; it’s best to keep that in view, repeat it a thousand and one times: when she comes home, the novel ends—the book continues until she comes home or until Julian is sure that she is not coming home again.

Alejandro Zambra

There is no real agenda, and this looseness requires Veronica’s absence in order to give the novel its shape. It serves no purpose other than to reveal this “fragile armor of the present”; it’s the closeness of the little girl and her stepfather that holds these 94 pages together as the novel delicately weaves through time. Glimpses of Veronica’s pregnancy in college, and Daniela at age thirty, bookend Julian’s more extensive ruminations. Zambra’s meanderings through Julian’s failed relationship, the different iterations of the novel he can’t finish, and his childhood, are enjoyable in and of themselves, though without quite adding up to a coherent whole.

Despite the novel’s brevity and lack of real structure, Julian is an exceptionally well-drawn character, his subdued eccentricity rendered sympathetically but honestly. Observations of, and insights into, his mindset and quirks are strewn throughout Private Lives with an insouciance only a very involved narrator could pull off. After Daniela has fallen asleep and Julian is still in denial regarding Veronica’s disappearance, he turns on an old soccer match and “doesn’t want to miss it, not for anything.” Such deflection of the desperation of his situation, put simply and without flourish, makes the reader aware of Julian’s mental state in a way more baroque prose would muddle.

As Julian moves through stages of grief, tragedy is combined with lightness and subtlety. When considering his career path, he says he thinks about telling people his true calling is “to have dandruff.” In a more manic moment, he decides to revisit his novel, and Zambra is especially adept at conveying both the writerly frustrations Julian faces:

Now he reads, he is reading… convincing himself that the text before his eyes was written by someone else. A misplaced comma or a harsh sound, however, and he returns to reality: he is then, again, an author, the author of something, a kind of self-policeman who punishes his own mistakes, his excesses, his inhibitions.

In the end, we know Julian finishes his book because Daniela, at thirty, reads it. This is the only end tied up in a novel that tells readers outright that the story “dissipates”—and it’s better for it. Private Lives is not as tight as Bonsai, but Zambra has proven here that he can do complex emotion as well as he can do cynicism.

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