Ways of Going Home – A Sumptuously Layered Poetic Reflection on Memory and History

"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 2^nd 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 4^th 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.