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A review by jdscott50
Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
I'm a big fan of Alejandro Zambra. His narrative structure is always unorthodox and clever. One of his books had a test format (Multiple Choice) as a narrative tool. Chilean Poet uses a traditional method to tell the story of love, poetry, and fathers and sons. The title is a nod to the strong Chilean Poet tradition, such as Neruda, Bolano, and others, but also how many poets struggle with its creation.
Gonzalo and Carla are inseparable, but one day they break up. Six years later, they reunite, but Carla has a six-year-old child. Is the child Gonzalo's? He takes the child on like he is his son and vice versa. When Carla gets cold feet about Gonzalo, she kicks him out and ends his relationship with her son Vincente. Another 12 years pass by, and Gonzalo and Vincente reunited. They do not have a solid familial connection, so they bond over their love of poetry.
Even though they are unrelated, the connection between father and son is intense. The need to create a new relationship with your child as an adult can be very difficult and demonstrates how rewarding that can be in this narrative.
What makes up a family? What are the moments we remember? The poetry of the mundane (not the famous) keeps the connection to one another.
Favorite Passages:
… that the world of Chilean poets is a little stupid but it's still more genuine, less false than the ordinary lives of people who follow the rules and keep their heads down. Of course there is opportunism and cruelty, but also real passion and heroism and allegiance to dreams. She thinks that Chilean poets are stray dogs and stray dogs are Chilean poets and that she herself is a Chilean poet, poking her snout into the trash cans of an unknown city—she likes to think of herself as a Chilean poet, a Chilean poet who is neither poet nor Chilean, but whose journalistic pilgrimage in search of a break, her always frustrated dream of publishing in the big magazines or at least writing a noteworthy and resonant piece, somehow unites her with those men and especially those women who skulk in the alleyways of myth and desire.
Those aren't the kinds of photos he is looking for, though. What he wants is the more casual record of daily life—he wants to recover images of Vicente playing with Darkness in the yard or blowing out candles on a birthday cake or walking in the park; he wants, above all, to recall the afternoons of boredom suddenly animated by the temptation of posing for the camera, for the future; that bold assurance, that blind and audacious wager on a future that is compatible with the present.
He looks for it and intends to reread it, though he's not sure he likes it, and as he is flipping through the pages he finds another poem, "Rodrigo Tomas Growing Up," which the poet dedicated to his three-year-old son. He is left paralyzed by those verses, which he already knew, but only now, under the threatening clarity of the present, does he isolate and absorb them: For your freedom, I gave you glorious snow and guiding star. I was your sentinel watching over you at dawn. I see me still, like a tree, breathing for your nascent lungs, freeing you from the chase and the seizure of beasts. Oh my son, son of my arrogance, I will always be atop that Andean scene a knife in each hand to defend you and save you. Would he have defended Vicente with a knife in each hand? Would he have given everything to save him, to protect him? Of course he would have, he answers himself. He did, in a way. He devoted himself to raising Vicente, to caring for him, but then he let time and distance do their work. He would still defend him, would still take a bullet for him, he would still rather die himself than let Vicente die. He would sacrifice himself. Wouldn't he?
He wouldn't want Gonzalo to get back together with Carla, but maybe he does want Gonzalo to exist again. For Carla and Gonzalo to exist in completely separate, parallel worlds, just as they do now. And to have access to both of those worlds. No more than that, no less.
Hopefully they don't lose touch. That would be the closest thing to a happy ending, and I'd like to go on writing until I reach a thousand pages, just to be sure that at least for those thousand pages Gonzalo and Vicente don't lose touch, but that would be to condemn them, rob them of life, of will, because it's possible that they want to stop seeing each other, and that for one of them, probably Vicente, or maybe for them both, it would be for the best. I don't know, we're never going to know, because this ends here, this ends well, the way so many books we love would end if we tore out their final pages. The world is falling to pieces and everything almost always goes to shit and we almost always hurt the people we love or they hurt us irreparably and there doesn't seem to be a reason to harbor any kind of hope, but at least this story ends well, ends here, with the scene of these two Chilean poets who look each other in the eye and burst out laughing and don't want to leave that bar for anything, so they order another round of beers.
Gonzalo and Carla are inseparable, but one day they break up. Six years later, they reunite, but Carla has a six-year-old child. Is the child Gonzalo's? He takes the child on like he is his son and vice versa. When Carla gets cold feet about Gonzalo, she kicks him out and ends his relationship with her son Vincente. Another 12 years pass by, and Gonzalo and Vincente reunited. They do not have a solid familial connection, so they bond over their love of poetry.
Even though they are unrelated, the connection between father and son is intense. The need to create a new relationship with your child as an adult can be very difficult and demonstrates how rewarding that can be in this narrative.
What makes up a family? What are the moments we remember? The poetry of the mundane (not the famous) keeps the connection to one another.
Favorite Passages:
… that the world of Chilean poets is a little stupid but it's still more genuine, less false than the ordinary lives of people who follow the rules and keep their heads down. Of course there is opportunism and cruelty, but also real passion and heroism and allegiance to dreams. She thinks that Chilean poets are stray dogs and stray dogs are Chilean poets and that she herself is a Chilean poet, poking her snout into the trash cans of an unknown city—she likes to think of herself as a Chilean poet, a Chilean poet who is neither poet nor Chilean, but whose journalistic pilgrimage in search of a break, her always frustrated dream of publishing in the big magazines or at least writing a noteworthy and resonant piece, somehow unites her with those men and especially those women who skulk in the alleyways of myth and desire.
Those aren't the kinds of photos he is looking for, though. What he wants is the more casual record of daily life—he wants to recover images of Vicente playing with Darkness in the yard or blowing out candles on a birthday cake or walking in the park; he wants, above all, to recall the afternoons of boredom suddenly animated by the temptation of posing for the camera, for the future; that bold assurance, that blind and audacious wager on a future that is compatible with the present.
He looks for it and intends to reread it, though he's not sure he likes it, and as he is flipping through the pages he finds another poem, "Rodrigo Tomas Growing Up," which the poet dedicated to his three-year-old son. He is left paralyzed by those verses, which he already knew, but only now, under the threatening clarity of the present, does he isolate and absorb them: For your freedom, I gave you glorious snow and guiding star. I was your sentinel watching over you at dawn. I see me still, like a tree, breathing for your nascent lungs, freeing you from the chase and the seizure of beasts. Oh my son, son of my arrogance, I will always be atop that Andean scene a knife in each hand to defend you and save you. Would he have defended Vicente with a knife in each hand? Would he have given everything to save him, to protect him? Of course he would have, he answers himself. He did, in a way. He devoted himself to raising Vicente, to caring for him, but then he let time and distance do their work. He would still defend him, would still take a bullet for him, he would still rather die himself than let Vicente die. He would sacrifice himself. Wouldn't he?
He wouldn't want Gonzalo to get back together with Carla, but maybe he does want Gonzalo to exist again. For Carla and Gonzalo to exist in completely separate, parallel worlds, just as they do now. And to have access to both of those worlds. No more than that, no less.
Hopefully they don't lose touch. That would be the closest thing to a happy ending, and I'd like to go on writing until I reach a thousand pages, just to be sure that at least for those thousand pages Gonzalo and Vicente don't lose touch, but that would be to condemn them, rob them of life, of will, because it's possible that they want to stop seeing each other, and that for one of them, probably Vicente, or maybe for them both, it would be for the best. I don't know, we're never going to know, because this ends here, this ends well, the way so many books we love would end if we tore out their final pages. The world is falling to pieces and everything almost always goes to shit and we almost always hurt the people we love or they hurt us irreparably and there doesn't seem to be a reason to harbor any kind of hope, but at least this story ends well, ends here, with the scene of these two Chilean poets who look each other in the eye and burst out laughing and don't want to leave that bar for anything, so they order another round of beers.