Ways of going home - Supernormal Reads

Paperback, 139 pages

English language

Published Jan. 8, 2013 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

ISBN:: 978-0-374-28664-4
OCLC Number:: 794603962

(1 review)

Ways of Going Home begins with an earthquake, seen through the eyes of an unnamed nine-year-old boy. He lives in an undistinguished middle-class housing development in Maipu, a town in the suburbs of Santiago, Chile. When the neighbors camp out overnight, the protagonist gets his first glimpse of Claudia, an older girl who asks him to spy on her uncle Raul.

In the second section, the protagonist is the writer of the novel begun in the first section. His father is a man of few words who claims to be apolitical but who quietly sympathized—to what degree, the author isn’t sure—with the Pinochet regime. His reflections on the progress of the novel and on his own life—which is strikingly similar to the life of his novel’s protagonist—expose the raw suture of fiction and reality.

Ways of Going Home switches between author and character, past and present, reflecting with melancholy and …

Ways of Going Home begins with an earthquake, seen through the eyes of an unnamed nine-year-old boy. He lives in an undistinguished middle-class housing development in Maipu, a town in the suburbs of Santiago, Chile. When the neighbors camp out overnight, the protagonist gets his first glimpse of Claudia, an older girl who asks him to spy on her uncle Raul.

In the second section, the protagonist is the writer of the novel begun in the first section. His father is a man of few words who claims to be apolitical but who quietly sympathized—to what degree, the author isn’t sure—with the Pinochet regime. His reflections on the progress of the novel and on his own life—which is strikingly similar to the life of his novel’s protagonist—expose the raw suture of fiction and reality.

Ways of Going Home switches between author and character, past and present, reflecting with melancholy and rage on the history of a nation and on a generation born too late—the generation who, as the author-narrator puts it, learned to read and write while their parents became accomplices or victims. It is the most personal novel to date from Alejandro Zambra, the most important Chilean author since Roberto Bolaño.

1 edition

ralentina reviewed Ways of going home by Alejandro Zambra

Formas de Volver a Casa / Ways of Going Home

4 stars

Content warning Medium spoilers!

"Parents abandon their children. Children abandon their parents. Parents protect or forsake, but they always forsake. Children stay or go but they always go."

In the first part of the book, the protagonist remembers the night following the 1985 earthquake, when he find himself, only a child, camping in the garden with his parents and neighbours, a secondary character barely aware of what has happened. It is on this night that he meets Claudia, an older girl for whom he develops a crush. Keen to please her and having a reason to meet her, he agree to spy on uncle Roberto, who is rumored to be a social democratic but, we discover later on (but suspect from the start) is actually hiding from the regime.

In the second part, we meet another protagonist: the writer who is working at the story introduced in the first part, a story that is clearly -partially auto-biographic. Like the kid in part one, the author grew up in a lower-middle class famiily in Maipú, whose political credo is not to get involved with politics, neither right nor left, 'Pinochet did a lot of horrible things, human rights violations and all, but one cannot deny that Chile has a lot to thank him for'.

From then on, the book switches between these two stories. It is a view on what I now understand to be a significant section of Chilean society, those who, without ideological fervor, accepted the dictatorship as the best of their options, and are now convinced that was a good call. And their children, many of who are horrified, and a little ashamed not to be able to claim a share of the glory that comes from having lost a grandad or an uncle to the torture centres or the extra judicial executions.

It is a very short, loving portrait of this complicated relationship, one that manages to be universal (don't all parents forsake their children, don't all children leave their parents?) and historically specific.

Subjects

Fiction
Chile
Novella

Places

Chile