bonsai, by Alejandro Zambra. Translated by Megan McDowell.
Alejandro Zambra’s “Bonsai” (translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell) opens with the following ending: What follows is Giulio (the aforementioned “he”) and Emilia (the aforementioned “she”) meeting, falling in love, and then losing contact, and seeing how Giulio is beautiful at the end of the novel, where beautiful Emilia dies. The page where you are.
This chain of events may hint at the kind of love story that writers such as Sarah Dessen and Nicholas Sparks have turned into literary and cinematic empires. Ideas are inherently poignant. Sentimentality, when acted irresponsibly, can cheapen a narrative to the point of imitation, so even empty readings can often turn out to be compelling. Zambra turns emotion and nostalgia into opportunities for humor, vulnerability, and truth. Emilia is trying to pinpoint her desire for Julio. we are too young to love each other ’” She then riffs on various Spanish and Chilean sex idioms. And here’s Giulio’s approach to relationships.
Passages like that show Zambra’s keenness for the thought patterns and blinking wisdom of youth. Both the desire for intimacy and the desire to keep intimacy at bay are felt in Emilia and her vocabulary game. In Julio, boyish anxieties about love.
One of my favorite moments in “Bonsai” is when Emilia and Giulio are revealed to be reading aloud to each other as foreplay. This custom leads them to Macedonio Fernández’s short story “Tantaria,” in which a couple purchases a plant as a token of their relationship. The Fernandez couple realized that the plant would one day die and take away their love, so in desperation they took the plant to the store and lost it among the other plants. They realize too late that they will never find this symbol of love again.
For Giulio and Emilia, like a cursed object, the story has a unique and painful effect. “As they say, they both knew the ending was already written – their ending,” observes the narrator. “They both had the illusion of at least completing Proust, dragging things into volume seven, and making the last word (the word ‘time’) the last word exchanged between them. ”
Their relationship ends soon afterward, but they each continue to live until one day Emilia dies.
Before she dies, Emilia moves to Madrid. However, Julio remained in Chile and was approached by a prominent author, who asked him to copy her handwritten notes. He doesn’t get the job, but what he does instead is one of the most notable elements of ‘Bonsai’. Giulio, sleeping with his neighbor, lies to his lover, telling him that he is translating the author’s novel after all. The title of the novel is “Bonsai”. And what he explains to her is the story of her relationship with Emilia. He imitates the handwriting of famous writers in his notebook, then copies his own text and gives the book to his lover, who leaves for Madrid. The creation of the novel is at the same time an act of copying and forgery, lying and truth, and understands something fundamental about art itself. limited express The most urgent material in our lives.
The bizarre and shifting structure of the novella gives “Bonsai” a playful quality. The whole story feels dominated by dream logic full of coincidence and ghostly echoes. For example, before leaving for Madrid, Emilia had a fight with her best friend and her former roommate Anita. Because Emilia rented Anita’s husband for her party in the office and finally he moved into her. This causes a rift between the two that is only bridged when Anita finds Emilia in Madrid. Years later, while waiting for Anita’s ex-husband to see a doctor, an old man leaves the office. The old man is actually a famous writer. Meanwhile, Julio’s former neighbor and lover arrives in Madrid on the fateful day of Emilia’s death, making her a startling witness.
Such coincidences can make the story feel silly or clumsy, as if they were a damaging or cheap effect on reality. Part of this is due to Zambra’s mastery of tone and timing, but most of all due to the racy yet casual way Zambra presents these coincidences. The novella has a dreamlike association, true, beautiful, and moving. When I left “Bonsai”, I felt a slight melancholic pain in my ribs, as if an important part of me had been taken away.
Brandon Taylor is the author of “Real Life” and “Filthy Animals”.
Bonsai, Alejandro Zambra | | WahooArt.com Translated by Megan McDowell | 79 Pages | Penguin Books | Paper, $16
