Synopses & Reviews
A brilliant novel from "the herald of a new wave of Chilean fiction" The Nation
Alejandro Zambra's Ways of Going Home begins with an earthquake, seen through the eyes of an unnamed nine-year-old boy who lives in an undistinguished middle-class housing development in a suburb of Santiago, Chile. When the neighbors camp out overnight, the protagonist gets his first glimpse of Claudia, an older girl who asks him to spy on her uncle Raúl.
In the second section, the protagonist is the writer of the story begun in the first section. His father is a man of few words who claims to be apolitical but who quietly sympathized — to what degree, the author isn't sure — with the Pinochet regime. His reflections on the progress of the novel and on his own life — which is strikingly similar to the life of his novel's protagonist — expose the raw suture of fiction and reality.
Ways of Going Home switches between author and character, past and present, reflecting with melancholy and rage on the history of a nation and on a generation born too late — the generation which, as the author-narrator puts it, learned to read and write while their parents became accomplices or victims. It is the most personal novel to date from Zambra, the most important Chilean author since Roberto Bolaño.
Review
"In Alejandro Zambra, the poet and novelist are organically fused. Nearly every line startles in one way or another, always propelling the story forward toward a complete emotional journey. Ways of Going Home is compact, intimate, but also sweeping — and Zambra is amazing!" Francisco Goldman, author of Say Her Name
Review
"Alejandro Zambra belongs to that rare species of writer who brings language back to life. The strength of Ways of Going Home, its potency, is in the way it unfolds language in order to place its readers at that almost ungraspable intersection between individual and collective history." Valeria Luiselli, author of Faces in the Crowd
Review
"Alejandro Zambra is one of the writers of my generation whom I most admire. Never a wasted word. Never a false note. His is an utterly unique voice, one I go back to again and again." Daniel Alarcón, author of Lost City Radio
Review
"[Zambra's novels] are written with startling talent. And Zambra's latest novel represents, I think, his deepest achievement . . . 'We go home, ' Zambra writes, 'and it's as if we were returning from war, but from a war that isn't over.' This is the giant, poignant condition staged by the novel's playful doubleness — the way the best conjuring trick is the one where you're shown how it's done, which in no way contradicts your belief that what you've seen is magic." The New York Times Book Review
Review
"In many ways, the book recalls the miniature roominess Philip Roth achieved in his great novel, The Ghost Writer. The stories we tell imagine us as much as us them, Zambra reminds, with the power and intensity of a writer who grew up in the shadow of a terrible war." The Boston Globe
About the Author
Alejandro Zambra is a poet, novelist, and literary critic who was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1975. He is the author of two previous novels, The Private Lives of Trees and Bonsai, which was awarded a Chilean Critics Award for best novel. He was selected as one of Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists and was elected to the Bogotá-39 list.
Megan McDowell is a literary translator living in Zurich, Switzerland. She also translated Alejandro Zambra's The Private Lives of Trees.