In this interview, I wanted to talk about the three latest books by Alejandro Zambra: Chilean Poet (2020), Literatura infantil (2023), and Un cuento de navidad (2023). Of course, the conversation touched on many other things besides: fatherhood in all its iterations, the relationship between children’s literature and the birth of his son Silvestre, writing outside of Chile, and, necessarily, Chilean poetry and its poets.
I had read Alejandro Zambra before. Ways of Going Home in particular struck me as a very well realized book. I thought, somehow, I had come to understand his literary world just by reading it. But I was wrong. Reading his last three books, one after another, gave me a new idea of Zambra’s literature—something I had sensed before, but couldn’t quite put my finger on. Now I know: it’s the strength of his prose’s tone. An encompassing tone that wipes away all dissonance, that stacks up differing stories and moods almost unnoticed. It is not a sad tone, as some have said. Or perhaps it is, but there is something more to it. It is also, I think, a way of capturing the world. Or feeling it. If I had to think of Alejandro Zambra as a poet, I would turn to this tone of his, so personal and unique. In the end—sometimes, for some people—prose is one of the hardest forms of poetry.
Marcelo Rioseco: Let’s imagine a fictional scenario in which we could talk to Gonzalo, the character from your novel Chilean Poet, and ask him, years after his separation from Carla, if being a stepfather was worth it. What do you think he’d say? The question might lead us to think about the rather strange circumstance of being a father with a sort of expiration date if things go wrong. Where do you think it goes, all that love that then seems impossible to get back? I ask because I think the ending of the novel points in that direction: two men, walking along, trying to get something back, although even they themselves aren’t quite sure what that something is.
Alejandro Zambra: Your question is more beautiful than any answer I could give, but anyway, I’d better answer it. I’d say it took me a few months to realize Chilean Poet was a rewriting—or maybe a rereading—of The Private Lives of Trees. Stepfatherhood was there from the start, of course, connecting the two books, since Chilean Poet was always more a novel about stepfatherhood than a novel about poetry. But shortly after that scene fell into place, in the first third of the novel, when Gonzalo grapples with the word stepfather, I started back down that tennish-year-long bridge between the two books. Maybe the fundamental difference between The Private Lives of Trees and Chilean Poet lies in the intensity of that struggle with the word stepfather. And in the magnitude of the resulting defeat.
I think, especially since Bonsai, I’ve tried to talk about the crisis of legitimacy and authority that we suffer and feel for ourselves, but that we also celebrate and feel thankful for on a daily basis. From certain points of view, all arguments are about legitimacy and authority. I was interested—and I still am—in depicting that delegitimized space of the stepfather in relation to masculinity. Stepfathers are the bad guys: that’s made clear in literature and the press and even in language itself, in both denotation and connotation. It’s hard to identify with that figure. So a stepfather like Gonzalo doesn’t necessarily get together with other stepfathers, because perhaps they all share this prejudice. The same goes for masculinity; it’s not easy to identify with other men, and yet building yourself up or putting yourself forward as an exception is absurd and somehow deceitful. Plus, exception is solitude. An exceptional story is a story of solitude. It’s hard for us to build camaraderie or reformulate what we have traditionally understood as camaraderie. And our relationships continue to be brutally competitive.
I think, from early on, Gonzalo knows his experience as a stepfather has been essential, or rather he distrusts other experiences. Then there’s the guilt of love’s classic spell; the guilt of clinging to the hypothesis of love-for-life when the only thing we know from the start, when it comes to love, is that separation is a permanent possibility. And also the guilt of having made assurances, of having consciously and sometimes consistently raised a child. You don’t get close to a child just to abandon that child. And, even though Gonzalo has a long and even solid line of reasoning that allows him to conclude he did not abandon Vicente, he knows he did in fact abandon him.
Vicente is the real protagonist. He’s the one who was abandoned, but he’s forced to suppose and accept that he wasn’t, that the story’s protagonists were his mother and his stepfather; there is a grief that he cannot officially, legitimately experience. That’s where the prefix “step-” starts acting against the stepson. There’s one apparently minor scene that was really hard for me to write, because it was especially painful for me, in which Vicente asks Gonzalo, almost completing his sentence, casually, if he’s ever going to abandon them. And Gonzalo has to say no, he’s never going to abandon them. When he gives this answer, of course he hopes it’s true. And, at the same time, he knows it’s not true. Or it might not be true.
M.R.: I was totally on board with the title Chilean Poet until I got to the party scene, with what seems to be the conclave of every poet in Santiago, and I joked to myself, “This book should be called Chilean Poets.” It’s a very funny scene, by the way, almost a parodic homage. What were you trying to say about Chilean poets in this novel? Is it a way of putting yourself, and other Chilean poets too, under a microscope? Who really is the Chilean poet in this story?
A.Z.: That’s exactly why I like the title being singular—you can read the novel through your question, almost as a riddle. Who is the Chilean poet? At any rate, I could only ever enter into the mystery of nationality from the place of Chilean poetry, because that’s the only element of my nationality, my Chileanness, that I’ve ever accepted as tradition. Everything else I questioned, or disputed, or ignored, or cast aside, but I’ve never been immune to Chilean poetry. Very quickly, very naturally, I found my playmates in Chilean poetry.
I aspired to poetry. I was always better at telling stories than writing poems, but I aspired to poetry. At the age of twenty, I was a bad poet, maybe because I took advantage of poetry’s “illegibility”—I wanted to talk without talking, to make it seem like I was saying something, like someone moving their lips and their hands, confident they’re being watched from afar, with no sound. Or like someone who swears they can play guitar when really they have no idea, they just want to be invited to join the band… And, well, they invited me to join and I got up onstage to make a fool of myself, and some people said nice things or understanding things and some people said things that seemed awful, but weren’t that awful in the end, or were awful, but much less awful than being alone.
M.R.: I really enjoyed the appearance of Sergio Parra as himself, a sort of literary cameo. I’m not sure if he’s the only character who appears under his real name, but it’s a very amusing nod to the inner history of Santiago’s literary scene. Are your characters based on real people, or are they 100% literary fiction?
A.Z.: I always work with real-life models: someone’s eyes, someone else’s hands… Someone’s way of thinking, mediated by an exogenous sense of humor. But there are rare cases when the person you’re imagining as you write coincides entirely with the person you mean to depict. This happened with a lot of characters in Chilean Poet—Rosabetty Muñoz, Armando Uribe, Nicanor Parra, and Sergio Parra, of course. I mean, I didn’t want to write a “documentary” novel about Chilean poetry, I was going the other way; I wanted to come up with a literature that could serve as a playing field for the studies and adventures of Gonzalo and Carla and Pru and Vicente. And it felt good to mix apples with oranges, but along the way, like I said, I came across character-people whom I decided I would rather keep intact.
M.R.: What’s the place of children’s literature in your own world? I ask because you say in your book Literatura infantil, “The idea that I make and read real literature, while the books we read together are a sort of substitute or imitation or preparation for real literature, strikes me as unfair as it is false.” I think there’s a lot to be said here about “real literature” and “necessary literature”—necessary in order to live, to be with a son or daughter, for instance. What would you say on that subject?
A.Z.: Literature is company, above all. There are times when we want to seem more intellectual, but the social drive always comes first. That will to play has always been there—it may be bashfully disguised, but it’s there. Reading and writing are activities we tend to carry out in solitude, but always, in the back of our minds, with an eye to company. In childhood, or towards the end of childhood, literature shone out like some kind of obscure band that nobody else had heard of, so it became imperative to leave your neighborhood and seek out other fans of this band. You wouldn’t have to go too far, either, because in every community, on every block there were one or two weirdos you could sit down and talk with. This brought about a different way of moving through the city and understanding human relationships. And through these bonds—often desperate, fervent, passionate, and loquacious—we managed to preserve the intensity and willfulness of childhood. We’re still doing it. I am, anyway. For me, the fluctuation between naivety and the desire for naivety is still very important. The impossible pursuit of naivety, we might call it, mediated by a genuine, involuntary naivety. Man, it’s hard to talk about these things; I don’t really understand them myself, they work better when we skim over a story and spot details in which we recognize ourselves. But I’m thinking about the desire to understand everything all over again, starting fresh. For example, at the moment, due to my fatherhood, I’m very interested in adanism, which obviously gets a lot of bad press. Every day you discover something that’s new to you but old to the world. But there is something important in that breakdown, that malfunction: there’s a party we sometimes don’t let ourselves into.
Anyway, I think that’s my doorway into the “children’s” world. Although, especially since the birth of my son, I can sense a sort of “pre-literary” space—that’s what I like to call it, but those aren’t exactly the right words. An initial moment, I mean, when literature, music, and humor are all blended together in one big delightful mess. I’m talking about intuitions here, because I don’t know if I ever really experienced that phase, if I truly lived through it. Nobody read me stories when I was a kid. On the contrary, there I was, like so many of us, in a constant struggle to leave childish things behind, to stop feeling ridiculous—that’s how I remember it. But still, I feel I’ve retrieved that phase I never had, that phase I may have partially made up, through poetry. Certain things I stumbled upon by chance, things that even contradicted what I was looking for, ended up being very important to me.
M.R.: How does it feel writing in the second person, writing to someone who hasn’t yet arrived? Whom are you speaking to in that moment? Is it actually a kind of monologue, a way of waiting for that child to whom you’re writing poems on your phone?
A.Z.: I don’t know how old I was when I first read “Monólogo del padre con su hijo de meses,” the poem by Enrique Lihn. Maybe thirteen or fourteen. That’s the implicit model for Literatura infantil, and maybe for all writing on fatherhood in the Chilean tradition. I was really impressed by that vision of a tragic, tender, and celebratory time (the “new joyous and painful game”), a form of realism I practiced daily as soon as I had my son in my arms. Because when a father, enraptured and tearful, holds his newborn child, he’s also thinking, “I’m going to drop him.” So the practice of speaking to someone who can’t answer ceases to be precisely that, or only that. The bond also formed, for me, in the surrealistic version of that famous semi-sleeplessness: Literatura infantil is pure recliner writing, my son and I half-asleep. He’s six years old now, and he talks a lot, and it’s hard for me to remember the time before he was talking because really, and in part thanks to Lihn’s poem, my son and myself were in communication from the first second; I never felt that classically masculine sensation of uselessness in the first few months. Later on we’ll become the main characters in the classic comedies of errors that take place between fathers and sons, I suppose.
M.R.: In Chilean Poet and in Un cuento de navidad, there’s a sensation of settling scores—but not in personal terms, nor in the penalty box. I’m not talking about revenge, but rather, instead, an author who’s settling scores with his past, with himself. Do you think, in literature (and especially in the act of writing itself), there’s an effort to do this, to settle scores, as if the book you’re writing could illusorily “improve upon or make up for” an unchangeable past?
A.Z.: I subscribe to that idea. Sometimes I even have a visceral feeling that literature does change the past. In any case, the past comes to us most commonly in the form of a question, that’s its everyday form, and literature allows for that kind of conversation. Writing is a habit, first and foremost. There’s the whole question of “becoming a writer,” of course… At some point you make some kind of decision, but it’s also the case that habit and play coincide. And other goals didn’t go your way. I’m not interested in any evangelical position on writing. I lean that direction, sometimes, but really we’re all locked in a struggle against chronological time, against the dictatorship of chronological time, and each of us fights that fight differently, in our own way. I was lucky enough to have literature around me. And it was around me in a way that was casual, with no obligations, not untethered from play. In its pure, pre-bibliographical state, we might say. If not for writing I would understand less, I would have understood less; writing has been my crutch. The imagery may seem alarmist, but I like that aphorism of Canetti’s that says, quite simply, “The pencil, my crutch.”
M.R.: There’s a scene in Un cuento de navidad where the writer and the editor argue over a copy of Bolaño’s 2666. When I read it, I realized there’s a certain correlation between Bolaño and yourself, in the way you both relate to Chilean poetry. Of course, Bolaño had a more epic, even hyperbolic view of poets than the one we read in your writing, but the two of you both have that connection to the world of Chilean poetry that I feel somehow characterizes all Chilean poets. Maybe it’s like when Gonzalo says somewhere that, if you’ve published a book, “you’re screwed, you’re a Chilean poet now.”
A.Z.: Of course, but I was already older when I read Bolaño. I was twenty-one or twenty-two when I came across Nazi Literature in the Americas. Perhaps for that reason Bolaño wasn’t like a father to me, he was more like that older brother who gets home late at night and climbs into your room through the window and starts telling you all about his adventures… Bolaño was partial to the same poets I admired, but discovering him also meant envisioning a contemporary Chilean prose, because even though I had grown up reading Chilean novelists, I used to see Chilean prose as a part of literary history, not a part of the future. I think that moment was healthy for us, when we “de-exagerrated” the differences between poetry and prose. And between traditional and avant-garde, and between poetry and antipoetry. Nowadays the Nerudian paradigm, demythicized and then immediately remythicized by Nicanor Parra, seems so old-school to me. I’m more interested in the poet once removed from the hero-antihero axis. I’m interested in seeing the poet fulfill a role in his community or cook up a plate of rice one Sunday afternoon.
M.R.: I’ve noticed, as have many others, that against all odds there are still a great deal of Chilenisms in your prose, even though you’ve lived out of the country for some time. How is your literary relationship with these expressions and turns of phrase? Do they help you write?
A.Z.: I believe literature is the second language of the monolingual. That second language includes one’s own language and the variants of Spanish. We were always willing not to understand. That’s what I’m most thankful to literature for. And to music. Unfamiliar idioms, foreign words, they weren’t problems—quite the contrary, they increased the attraction. We were willing not to understand slightly, momentarily; not understanding was the step that led to a possible future understanding, which sometimes simply never came. And who cares if it came or not? I know that’s not exactly what you asked, but it’s still true. Your own country’s literature always matters more to you, causes you more pain. I’m tremendously interested in these issues, I find them entertaining. And I feel no attraction to the blind, furious defense of any one single identity or state of things; any mechanism that seeks to freeze conversation, any form of paralysis, of certainty… Plus, when you live outside your own country, every loss is really a gain, a discovery. Every time you miss your own way of speaking, you discover nuances you didn’t know you needed.
I also love to savor the hodgepodge of accents, I’ve always liked that. My way of speaking changes, and so my way of writing changes too. Because, even though my idea of style is hazy and protean, it feeds on speech; there is some part of my prose that demands a certain musical dimension, that aspires to it. I’m not generalizing. As a reader, I like lots of books in which orality works in other ways, but in my case I need every single word to go up against the sound test. And I’m more influenced every day by the way my son speaks—he has a strong, chronic case of Mexico City Spanish. But I like to lose my confidence in words, and to find myself having to construct an illusory, provisional new confidence. I love it, Marcelo, having these sorts of issues at the age of 48. Every day I think about nuances, details. And I’m impressed by the persistence of Chilean ways, too. We’ve put together a fun community here, with some Chilean musicians in particular; that helps a lot to generate a sort of fertile confusion, which makes life a little easier to bear.
M.R.: One question we always ask here at LALT has to do with the very nature of this magazine: being Latin American. I’d like to ask you how your perspective on Chile and Chilean literature has changed since you’ve been living in Mexico, a country with great cultural heft. Do you feel like you’re more in Latin America, or just in Mexico, or perhaps just that you’re not in Chile? Does the place you’re writing from matter to you?
A.Z.: Of course. I’d say I feel like I’m in transit—not just between Chile and Mexico—and I enjoy it. I turn to images, of course, because comparing countries is a game (or vice) as absurd as it is inevitable and necessary. Just the same, on every trip home my country strikes me as more thoroughly Latin American. But at the same time, perhaps contradictorily, that pathological Chilean pessimism is vying—ever more acutely, in my case—with that senseless and inexplicable Mexican optimism. I don’t see it as a rivalry, but as a passage, I think, heading towards the future much more than the past. I really want my son to appropriate more of my country, to feel it’s his own. It’s a simple, dumb feeling. I love it when we come back from Chile and I can hear his accent has changed a little bit.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
Photo: Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra, by Agence Opale / Alamy Stock Photo.
