Saturday 4 February 2017














My Documents by Alejandro Zambra   {Reviewed by THOMAS}
“My father was a computer, my mother a typewriter. I was a blank page and now I am a book.” Zambra's enjoyable (occasionally disconcerting) book is a collection purportedly from the 'My Documents' folder on his desktop. In the first three sections, Zambra, or a narrator very similar to Zambra, relates, in clean, direct (though sometimes ironic) and energetic prose, events or thematic developments from a life growing up and progressing through adulthood in a Chile over which hangs the shadow of the Pinochet regime and under which the earth occasionally unexpectedly shifts. The true subject of these pellucid pieces is always memory, and the tension that always exists between memory and personal or collective history: how does the past shape who we are, and what is the relationship between living an experience and living as someone who has had an experience? What is the difference between a memory and a story? In the fourth section the stories are told in the third person and have a different texture: why should this be, considering that there is no real reason (only a tendency) to think of these characters and events as any more fictional than those told in the first person?

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