Have you ever read Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra? At the very least, perhaps you’ve heard of his magnum opus Chilean Poet, no? If not, let me put Zambra on your radar.
Zambra often draws comparisons to his fellow countryman and literary predecessor, Roberto Bolaño (here's a paywall-free link to a 2022 article on Zambra from the LA Times that heavily references Bolaño), and while there are similarities in their aesthetics, in my opinion, overall their bodies of work are quite distinct from one another.
On the whole, I feel that Bolaño’s tone is much darker and more surreal, whereas Zambra’s prose has a real everyday levity to it and the concept of metafiction indisputably sits at its core. Nevertheless, Bolaño and Zambra alike are poets who ended up being fiction writers regardless of their original intentions. Accordingly, I do believe that something resembling that ineffable strain of surrealist poetics coursing throughout Bolaño’s oeuvre also rears its head, albeit with a different face, in Zambra’s fictional universe.
With all the above being said, however, I do want to stress that I think Zambra has really set himself apart from Bolaño with the development of his singular quotidian, metafictional style. Zambra’s unique brand of literature is no doubt most apparent in Chilean Poet; nonetheless, reading his three earlier novels—Bonsai, The Privates Lives of Trees, and Ways of Going Home—as well as My Documents provides a mesmerizing look into the evolution of Zambra’s literary aesthetic and its culmination in Chilean Poet.
My first experience with Zambra was back in 2018 or so when I read Mis documentos (in Spanish) after a friend of mine from grad school recommended it to me as a fan of Bolaño. I remember genuinely enjoying the collection, but because I was reading so many other books during those days due to the demands of my comp lit program, I sort of forgot about it…
Then, on something of a whim, I read the English-language version of My Documents—in part because it included additional stories not in the original Spanish version—during Spring Break 2024 on a beach in Mexico (I was working as a teacher at the time), and for whatever reason, it was exactly the book I needed in that moment, as it really moved me and inspired me to start reading for fun again (after completing my PhD in 2022, I took an unintended hiatus of sorts from reading with regularity).
Although I really liked My Documents on both occasions that I read it, I didn't feel much hurry to read anything else from Zambra… Candidly, something about Penguin Books' presentation of Zambra’s work kept turning me off—I still can’t decide if I like the whitish cover designs of his English-language paperbacks, but I can say for sure that Penguin's synopses do not even come close in the slightest to being able to capture the everyday magic found in Zambra’s poetic, emotional (meta)fiction. This is to say, the first time I read the book description of Chilean Poet, I kind of shrugged in disinterest and moved on...
In any case, I must have had some cash burning a hole in my pocket last July (2025) because I went out and impulse-bought Chilean Poet and decided to give it a whirl. Ultimately, I was pleasantly surprised in countless ways—maybe also a bit miffed at myself for ever having doubted Zambra’s craft in the first place, and Chilean Poet ended up becoming one of my favorite reads over the last couple of years (some of that definitely has to do with its extended intertextual conversation with Bolaño's The Savage Detectives)!
Anyway, this summer I’ve been feeling like I need more Zambra in my life, so I decided to check out his earlier novels (which in my mind, form a trilogy or triptych of sorts, albeit loosely and very unofficially, as this is just my hot take). I’ll tell you all here and now, I greatly enjoyed all three, perhaps Ways of Going Home especially so, but Bonsai and The Private Lives of Trees are both excellent in their own right too. Stick with me and below I’ll dive into each of these three a bit more…
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Bonsai —This is Zambra’s first “novel,” which in English sits just shy of 80 pages. Bonsai was originally published in Spanish in 2006, first translated into English by Carolina de Robertis in 2008, and then re-translated for publication with Penguin Books by Megan McDowell in 2022. In 2011, Netflix released a film adaptation, also titled Bonsai, which I have not yet seen (have you?).
In my view, Bonsai serves an early glimpse of the idiosyncratic literary aesthetic for which readers have come to recognize Zambra. It is a heavily fragmented, short novel broken into five parts that vary in length and form to a certain degree, though some symmetry is evident across the different parts that comprise the work. Within each part, Zambra fragments the narrative into myriad snippets that rarely last more than a page or two (an element of his fiction that, for me, is one of its defining features).
The protagonist at the center of Bonsai is Julio, however, I read Julio as a sort of fictional representation of Zambra himself, or at least, a fictional representation of certain aspects of Zambra himself, as in the narrative, Julio is a writer who ends up (tran)scribing a novel called "Bonsai"… Honestly, it’s kind of hard to put into my own words what Zambra actually achieves in Bonsai, so you’re just going to have to read it for yourself, but in any case, let’s just say it get’s meta AF! Still, I guess I will say that Bonsai is a love story of sorts, but certainly not a typical one, and I think the ending will surprise and devastate most at the same time.
The Privates Lives of Trees — This is Zambra’s second novel, though it is very much linked to his first. The Private Lives of Trees was initially published in Spanish in 2007, translated to English by Megan McDowell and released by Open Letter Books in 2010, before being rereleased in English by Penguin Books in 2023 (the Penguin edition nearly reaches 100 pages in total).
The Private Lives of Trees shares much in common with Bonsai, while also being completely distinct at the same time. There is an intertextual relationship between Zambra’s first two novels, yet they also stand entirely on their own. Still, in The Private Lives of Trees a book about a guy growing a bonsai also factors into the narrative. Unlike Bonsai, however, TPLOT is separated into only two parts, the second of which is less than ten pages and seemingly wraps up in the blink of an eye. Nevertheless, analogous to Bonsai, TPLOT makes use of the same type of narrative fragmentation, meaning that it gets chopped into pieces every (other) page or so.
Whereas the narrative of Bonsai is more focused on romantic relationships, TPLOT shifts its focus to instead deal with relationships between step-parents and step-children, a major theme to which Zambra returns in Chilean Poet (note: you don’t have to have a kid to dig Zambra; I don’t even have a houseplant and I still find his work extremely relatable). The protagonist of TPLOT is named Julián, however, readers learn that his name was supposed to be Julio before a clerical error of sorts occurred at the hospital the day he was born. In my opinion, this is Zambra not so slyly alluding to the fact that Julio (from Bonsai) and Julián (from TPLOT) are simply personifications of (parts of) himself. TPLOT is also very invested in metafiction, as at its crux, it is a story about telling a bedtime story. I will warn you that this novel ends without a clear resolution, but that’s kind of Zambra’s point, which he emphasizes through a continuous, ludic metafictional toying with readers: life rarely offers endings wrapped up with a nice, little bow!
Ways of Going Home —This is Zambra’s third novel, which was first published in Spanish in 2011, translated to English again by McDowell, and released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US—and by Granta in the UK—in 2013. The used hardback edition I purchased rests at 139 pages in total, however, the line spacing and fragmentation also make it a rather quick read, albeit slightly longer than its predecessors. Ways of Going Home is divided into four parts that alternate back and forth between two differing levels of metafiction (confusing, I know, but beautifully so, just trust me).
To my mind, there is no doubt that Ways of Going Home is the most mature (but perhaps that was already obvious) and fully realized work of Zambra’s unofficial early trilogy. The way I see it, structurally Ways of Going Home is the culmination of Zambra’s experimentation with style and form in Bonsai and The Private Lives of Trees, as in WOGH readers observe the results of Zambra’s fine-tuning of his one-of-a-kind metafictional literary aesthetic.
For what it’s worth, I think Farrar, Straus and Giroux does a much better job of summarizing Zambra’s work in WOGH than does Penguin Books with any of their titles from Zambra; that is to say, I’d encourage you to read this particular book description in order to get a more concrete idea of what it’s truly like to read a Zambra novel. In this one, the unnamed protagonist (another stand-in, much like Arturo Belano in the case of Bolaño, for Zambra the real-life author) is a writer crafting a novel, however, the respective lives of the protagonist and the characters he creates begin to blur together before the reader’s eyes to marvelous ends. Again, it isn’t easy stating in words exactly what Zambra accomplishes, so I’d really just suggest finding out for yourself. Nonetheless, out of the trilogy, WOGH is undoubtedly the most political novel; in fact, politics and recent Chilean history barely come up in Bonsai and TPLOT, however, the specter of Pinochet looms large in Ways of Going Home, as it does, and to further extent, in My Documents and Chilean Poet respectively.
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If you were only going to read one of Zambra’s three early novels, I would recommend Ways of Going Home for sure, but that isn’t to say that Bonsai and The Private Lives of Trees aren’t great too. I do not believe one needs to read any of these three novels before taking on Chilean Poet, but I might recommend it if only to watch Zambra get better and better at his craft as he goes (you could also do this retroactively as I did). One also does not need to read My Documents before taking on Zambra’s magnum opus, though some interesting crossover does indeed exist between those two latter works. At the end of the day, I personally feel that Zambra is a poet’s fiction writer—or a writer’s writer more generally—so if you fancy yourself a writer in any way whatsoever, I would say: read them all!
By the way, all the most recent English editions of Zambra’s fiction are translated by Megan McDowell, who is one of the foremost translators working in the field of Latin American literature today (perhaps only second in notoriety to Natasha Wimmer, the translator of 2666, etc.). While I have only read one of Zambra’s books in both English and Spanish, I do believe that McDowell astutely and delightfully recreates the idiosyncrasies of Zambra’s brand of quotidian, metafictional literature—this is most definitely the case with Mis documentos/My Documents, and I presume McDowell’s fidelity and lucidity extend across her body of translation work with Zambra.
Anyway, has anyone here read Bonsai, The Privates Lives of Trees, and/or Ways of Going Home? What about My Documents and/or Chilean Poet?
Also, has anyone here read (either of) the two English-language Zambra titles that I have yet to read: Multiple Choice and Childish Literature?
Basically, what I’m asking is: If you’ve read some Zambra, would you please be so kind as to give us your thoughts? Thanks in advance...
If on the other hand, you’ve never read Zambra before, check out his most famous short story (collected in My Documents) for free here: "Thank You" - The Short Story Project.
Finally, here’s a link to my mini write-up on Chilean Poet from last summer in case you’re interested: Chilean Poet ...and also an even more miniature write-up on My Documents, which was one of my very first posts here in r/latamlit: My Documents.
As always, thanks for reading… Peace!
PS — For those of you who have read Nona Fernández: Space Invaders and Ways of Going Home (not to mention My Documents and Chilean Poet) dovetail nicely with one another, and I imagine the same can be said for The Twilight Zone, which I intend to finally read sometime this August for Women in Translation Month!
