Editor’s Note: This text is from the new edition of My Documents by Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell, which will be published in 2024 by Penguin Books. We are grateful to the press for allowing us to include this text in bilingual edition in this issue’s feature on the work of Alejandro Zambra.
I am perhaps the most avid and completist reader of Alejandro Zambra out there. I have translated all of his books, which means I’ve read them many times in both Spanish and my own English. I’ve had the pleasure of talking at length with Alejandro about the thinking and experiences that have informed his work. And even so, whenever I return to a particular work after some time away, I discover something new. I think this must have to do with the space he leaves in a text for the reader, which makes it so that whatever or whoever I am when I read, I take something different from it, I fit differently into that space.
It’s been ten years since Zambra and I worked together on My Documents. It was the third book of his I had translated, and his first short story collection. I was at the beginning of my career, still learning (I am, of course, still learning). I remember feeling that Alejandro’s book of short stories, ironically, gave him more room to spread out than his novels. Unlike his first two books, this one stretched to a comparatively whopping 272 pages and unfurled a range of voices that weren’t always the carefully pruned ones of Bonsai, The Private Lives of Trees, and Ways of Going Home. There is the expansive voice of “Thank You,” where we first see the branching, run‐on voice that later returns in parts of Chilean Poet. There are melancholic voices—I remember tears in my eyes every time I got to the end of “Camilo,” maybe thinking this time the story wouldn’t end that way. There are, especially, inquisitive voices—Zambra is constantly questioning assumptions, and seems to love and distrust the act of writing in equal measure.
Zambra’s self‐examination through fiction, one might say, reached a critical point in My Documents. The book includes many of the themes he returns to repeatedly in his work: the experience of growing up in dictatorship; technology, seemingly monolithic and soon obsolete; the uncertain middle class; and, of course, literature, which is to say fiction, which is to say a prevailing concern with truth. And now, upon returning to this book that is a touchstone in my own literary life, I see even more clearly that My Documents is part of a longer, overarching exploration that runs throughout Zambra’s work, one that has to do with an intense questioning of ideas of legitimacy and authority, two words that are not synonyms but are intimately bound up with each other. This line of interrogation offers a point of entry into nearly all of his books and stories, and for My Documents in particular, it could be useful to examine the stories through these lenses in many respects, but especially, I believe, with regard to his treatment and questioning of masculine roles.
I have long been aware of the position of ambiguity or uncertainty from which Zambra approaches his stories and his characters, both male and female, which counterintuitively manifests in an insistence on specificity, a refusal to lean on cliché. Over the course of his career, he has been putting the microscope to masculinity using a variety of lenses, from the political to the domestic and familial. Especially beginning with The Private Lives of Trees, which focused on a male protagonist whom we see solely in the interior, domestic space in the role of caregiver; continuing with Ways of Going Home, in which the male narrator’s authorial voice is called into question by both the “fictional” Claudia and the “real” Eme; and continuing through to Chilean Poet and the newly published Literatura infantil, both focused on variations of the fatherly role, Zambra is in many ways declaring that we need to rethink the assumptions surrounding men’s roles in the world and in literature.
In My Documents, that exploration becomes a radical, dark, tender, and at times brutal interrogation of the various masculine roles and expectations that have been passed down through generations. A book ahead of its time, it seems to prefigure our current moment, which among many other social ills is suffering from an oft‐cited “crisis of masculinity.” Father, son, teacher, friend, writer, reader—what do those words really mean? And what do they mean when we put the most basic adjectives like “good” and “bad” in front of them? What does it mean to be a “good man”?
The stories in this book center on male protagonists who are no heroes. They are often middle‐class, mediocre men. Teachers who overstep in their positions of authority, angry divorced dads half‐assing fatherhood, and, as in “Family Life,” liars straight‐up lying to lovers about who they even are. In the nesting‐doll story “Artist’s Rendition,” a writer exploits a story of sexual assault to complete a commission, while a separate narrator wrestles with the moral implications of telling a tale whose reality he cannot comprehend. It is a demanding story in many respects—it takes some of the questions about authorial responsibility posited in Ways of Going Home and spins them out to their darkest lengths. My Documents, in fact, is the book where Zambra arguably asks the most of the reader. In “Memories of a Personal Computer,” for example, we as readers are implicated in turn when the protagonist on whose side we have so far uncomplicatedly been reveals himself capable of cold brutality. We feel betrayed, and also guilty for what our readerly complacencies have led us to accept in a character.
Other characters are more sympathetic in their ambivalent and bumbling searches for meaning, for a way to make room for tenderness and companionship within an often rigid definition of manhood. The character of Camilo seems to prefigure Vicente in Chilean Poet, both of them young men earnestly searching for a space of sincere and uncompetitive connection. And sure, Rodrigo (possibly the world’s most Chilean man) makes his version of a grand gesture of love without realizing that it obliterates the agency of his beloved, but you can’t help but admire his guts and feel a little sorry for him, though even that pity is not uncomplicated.
Zambra has said that all literature is fundamentally about belonging. I think what he means is that through literature, we as writers and readers come to understand our position in the world and our relationships with other humans. I can’t help but think that this belonging also has much to do with compassion. And of course, we cannot talk about belonging without asking certain questions: “To what do we belong? To what do we want to belong?”
My Documents is, at its core, a book about what it means to belong to a gender that men are only recently having to start thinking of as a gender, a category to which one belongs, rather than a default state of human existence around which all other conditions are organized. In the story that opens the collection (the only straightforwardly autobiographical piece), the narrator looks back at his childhood, when he was awakening to Capital Letter subjects like Religion, Sexuality, Politics, and Literature. He tells us: “I tried to take positions, though they were, at first, erratic and fleeting, a bit like Leonard Zelig: what I wanted was to fit in, to belong… I figured out that a very effective way to belong was to simply keep quiet.”
Silence is an important concept throughout Zambra’s work. The idea of literature as bonsai, which he introduced in his first novel, has much to say (or not say) about it—the trimming away of all that is unnecessary or extraneous is also an injection of silence. There is the silence of complicity and the silence of fear in the years of the Pinochet dictatorship (most of the ’70s and ’80s) in both Multiple Choice and Ways of Going Home. And My Documents in its own way arises from a silence, the silence of processing, of self‐criticism, where the “self” is an individual, yes, but also a group, a generational and often gendered “we.” My Documents is an attempt to move out of that silence and to face, perhaps even change, that category of belonging we call masculinity.
Zambra, like many great writers, I suspect, is a person for whom language is a problem. Words don’t say what we want them to, and that is a problem. Figuring out how to use words in a way that changes their meaning is a fundamental concern. Using them in a way that changes reality, even more so. In “Long Distance,” the narrator uses letter writing to help his students “discover the power of language, the ability of words to truly influence reality.” Later, similarly, Chilean Poet will find a protagonist frustrated with the negative connotations of the Spanish word for “stepfather,” padrastro. But these are the words that we have, and “we have to use them. We have to use them or maybe invent others.”
When Ways of Going Home established the idea of “literature of the children” (stories of those who grew up under dictatorship), it had much to do with the distrust or rejection of inherited literary voices and their version of “truth” that could tend toward the binary. Zambra was planting his flag in the territory in between, a no‐man’s‐land from which to question the firm, sure, declarative voice that could also be dictatorial, paternalistic, patronizing, and didactic. More honest was an experimentalism that exposed not just the content but the container (as with a bonsai, a word that encompasses both tree and vessel), or, in My Documents, that put the machinery out in the open and emphasized the tools of writing. For computers are personal, which is to say individual. At least, the mass‐manufactured screens we sit in front of create the illusion of individuality, and the trappings of capitalism work hard to encourage that illusion. Windows (which used to be mere panes of glass) comes with standardized folders that sound like selfish toddlers screaming “mine!” Because that “My Documents” folder is yours, no matter that every other computer comes with one just like it. The gesture of My Documents the book is to break out of that false or imposed individuality and move toward a deliberate “ours.”
The passage from “Literature of the Children” to “Children’s Literature”—as the title of Zambra’s latest book, published in Spanish in 2023, might be transliterated—has been the search for a true, genuine narrative voice. In My Documents, that quest reached into dark depths and up to bright heights to articulate Zambra’s most searching questions. They are questions he has ventured answers to in his later books, but there is power and urgency in returning to the questions and seeing where we fit into them today.
I’m also pleased that we were able to include some additional stories in this edition, which we believe add to the book’s range of meaning while not straying too far from its narrative scope. Some, like “Fantasy” and “Cyclops,” were written well before the original publication of My Documents—“Fantasy,” in fact, is one of Zambra’s first short stories—while others were written later. They have all been published in English in various magazines, but have never been collected in a book before now. Still, every time I read “Penultimate Activities” I think it was there from the very beginning, as the perfect final piece for this volume.
As someone who has had Alejandro’s voice in my head for well over a decade now, I am also a person for whom words are a problem. I can’t help but notice how the words we often use to talk about translation tend to be fundamentally static: preserve, maintain, conserve. But what I hope to achieve in translation has more to do with a living text, one that makes room for you, our readers, the way I feel Zambra’s writing has made room for me. Because while we may not be part of the same categories of belonging in terms of nationality or gender, in My Documents, Zambra is working to articulate a truly comprehensive empathy and shared sense of humanity.
June 2023
From the new edition of My Documents, forthcoming from Penguin Books in 2024