Author(s): Alejandro Zambra

Novel | Translated fiction | Chile | Fitzcarraldo Editions

Available in a beautifully rendered new translation, Alejandro Zambra's brilliantly distilled first novel is a formally innovative, metafictional tale of love, art and memory.

 Bonsai is the story of Julio and Emilia, two young Chilean students who, seeking truth in great literature, find each other instead. Like all young couples,they lie to each other, revise themselves, and try new identities on for size, observing and analyzing their love story as if it's one of the great novels theyboth pretend to have read. As they shadow each other throughout their youngadulthoods, falling together and drifting apart, Zambra spins a formally innovative, metafictional tale that brilliantly explores the relationship among love,art, and memory.

'The "last truly great book" I read has to be Alejandro Zambra's Bonsai. A subtle, eerie, ultimately wrenching account of failed young love in Chile ... A total knockout.' - Junot Daz

Review:

'The "last truly great book" I read has to be Alejandro Zambra's Bonsai. A subtle, eerie, ultimately wrenching account of failed young love in Chile among the kind of smartypant set who pillow-talk about the importance of Proust.... A total knockout.'
- Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

'Every beat and pattern of being alive becomes revelatory and bright when narrated by Alejandro Zambra. He is a modern wonder.'
- Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch

'Rather than shrink in its conversion to bound covers, as most manuscripts do, Zambra's text has swelled-and its effect on the world of Chilean literature has been entirely disproportionate to its size.'
- Marcela Valdes, The Nation

'The most talked-about writer to come out of Chile since Bolano.'
- New York Times

'Strikingly original.'
- James Wood, New Yorker

'Bonsai fulfills one of the requirements of the short novel: the search for perfection [...] supremely, effectively ambiguous.'
- J.A. Masoliver Rodenas, La Vanguardia

'When I read Zambra I feel like someone's shooting fireworks inside my head.'
- Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive

'Not a single word is wasted in this powerful, elegantly told story, which traces through a few episodes in the lives of Julio and Emilia, two young people who fall for one another at university-bonding over their love of literature and discussion-then retreat from one another's lives.'
- Literary Hub

Author Biography: Alejandro Zambra is the author of the poetry collections Bahia inutil and Mudanza, the novels Bonsai, which won the Critics Prize and the National Council Prize for Books for the best novel of the year, La vida privada de los arboles (The Private Lives of Trees) and the book of essays No leer (2010). Ways of Going Home was the winner of the Altazor Prize and the Consejo Nacional del Libro Prize, both for the best 2011 Chilean novel. He lives in Santiago and is a literature professor at the University Diego Portales.

Megan McDowell is an award-winning Spanish-language translator. She has translated books by Alejandro Zambra, Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enriquez and Lina Meruane, among others, and her short story translations have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Harper's and The White Review. She lives in Santiago, Chile.