The Rachel Shihor Interview
Graphs, Maps, Trees
Alejandro Zambra, well-known to many as the author of Bonsai (see The Quarterly Conversation’s review here), has just published a new novel (his third) in Spanish: Formas de volver a casa (“Ways of Returning Home”).
No word yet on an English translation date for that book, but The Millions does have an interview with Zambra.
TM: Tell us a little about Formas de volver a casa—is it much of a departure from your first two books?
AZ: It’s a book about memory, about parents, about Chile. It’s about the 80s, about the years when we children were secondary characters in the literature of our parents. It’s about the dictatorship, as well, I guess. And about literature, intimacy, the construction of intimacy. I don’t know if it’s very different from my previous books; the truth is I feel like it’s close to The Private Lives of Trees. In fact it starts from there, from some of the intuitions or images of the past that were in that book. Maybe the main difference is that it’s in large part narrated in the first person. It also includes a writer’s diary, a kind of center or heart in which the fiction breaks, and the only thing left is the writer’s voice searching for its origins. It’s my most personal book, without a doubt, although the others were that as well.
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