"That’s what we grew up believing, that the novel belonged to our parents We cursed them, and also took refuge in their shadows relieved. While the adults killed or were killed, we drew pictures in a corner. While the country was falling to pieces, we were learning to talk, to walk, to fold napkins in the shape of boats, of airplanes. While the novel was happening, we played hide-and-seek, we played at disappearing."
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes are some of the great Latin American novelists who depicted the region’s
historical trauma in its totality. Chilean novelist Alejandro Zambra’s slender
yet beautifully structured Ways of Going Home (published in 2011 and translated
to English by Megan McDowell) is an opposite to those books. Zambra doesn’t
touch upon any painful historical moment although he reflectively approaches
the experience of growing up during Pinochet’s brutal regime; the silent
generation that still finds it hard to come to terms with their nation’s
disorienting history. In other words, Zambra’s concise and unpretentious prose
doesn’t revolve around any particular, single event from the past (personal or
historical), but rather contemplates ways to reconcile the elusive memories of
the past with the present.
Divided into four chapters, the novel opens with the
childhood experiences of a nine-year-old boy in the mid-80s, Santiago, Chile.
Written like a diary, this part chronicles the boy’s friendship with
the 12-year-old Claudia. She is the niece to the boy’s allegedly Christian Democrat
neighbor, Raul. Later, Claudia asks the boy to spy on her uncle, and report her the
details during their weekly rendezvous. The Pinochet dictatorship is referenced
in this part, but from a child’s understanding of politics. He also closely
watches Raul’s house to report the visit of Raul’s friend and a mysterious
young girl. But the boy doesn’t exactly understand why Claudia has asked him to
spy on Raul or who the young woman is, or why Claudia abruptly moved away,
because as the title of this chapter indicates, the boy is just a ‘Secondary
Character’.
Alejandro Zambra depicts what the critics call as ‘the
shadow of the Pinochet era’. Hence the country’s history of terror always seems
to be the ‘elephant in the room’. And since Zambra’s generation were either
shielded from the brutalities of the dictatorship or remained less cognizant of
what happened around them (during childhood), silence is expected from them
(‘secondary characters in the literature of their parents’). The moment they
try to talk of history or the past to the older generation, they get the
variation of ‘you don’t know the suffering & pain we went through.” In a
joke in the 2nd part of the novel, a boy says to his dad, ‘When I
grow I want to be a secondary character’, to which the dad asks ‘Why?’, and the
boy smugly replies, ‘Because the novel is yours’.
The second part revolves around an un-named narrator in the
present (2009-10; set around the democratic Chile’s Presidential election). We
can assume that this narrator is the voice of the author himself who confesses
that the previous chapter is a fictionalized version of his childhood. He has
separated from his beloved wife, Eme, yet they meet each other often. He compels
ex-wife Eme to read the manuscript of his slowly evolving new novel, in which he
says she’s the protagonist. In the third chapter, the narrator brings together
Claudia and the boy, set in the present (it becomes clear that Claudia
represents the author’s ex). The Meta narration turns weightier and the
symbolisms become more appealing in the 4th chapter. Eventually, it becomes a novel
about a novelist expressing how difficult it is to write a novel.
Ways of Going Home is a superb meditative novel, even
without taking into account the very Chilean context. It pays tribute to the
vocation of writing. It deals with the slippery nature of memory, the power of
nostalgia, and honesty in art. Zambra tells a very simple story, but the beauty
lies in the way he dissects the different levels of memory; an
individual’s memory engaged in a perpetual conflict with the inherited narrative of the parents and also from the
collective recollection of history. The author finds catharsis in dissociating
himself from the traditional framing of fiction, and by acknowledging the
uncertainty in life. Ways of Going Home could be simply labeled as
‘metafictional failed love stories’. But that won’t do justice to the
emotionally affective writing style of Zambra, or to his profound, creative use
of intertextuality. Overall, it’s a short, elegant novel that fascinatingly
converses and transcends the novel-narrative form.
