Wednesday, October 23, 2013

One of my favorite books


This time I want to talk about the last book I read this year,, and became to one my favorite. I mean "The Private life of the Trees" by Alejandro Zambra, this is not one of my favorite books, but it is one of the most beautiful I have ever read, the way to describe things is captivating.

In private life of trees Julian (the protagonist of the story) awaits Veronica (his wife) while Daniela are sleeping, her daughter. The novel part with that night waking. One hopes that opens abysses of concerns, the night progresses and Veronica don't arrive. To reassure the girl, Julian tells a story of private life of the trees, where they come to life and are the protagonists. But Veronica does not arrive. What will happen with Daniela?, what will happen when she have twenty?, thirty years?. What are the love stories that she will live?, is what Julian begins to imagine. And  the book progresses. And we don'tknow what happened to Veronica.

 

Zambra develops a complex and fine writing, with small everyday stories that roam common life. As Zambra himself says: "The Chilean narrators write for inside, as if the novel was, in reality, the echo of a poem long repressed". In his prose there is a lot of poetry, but that numbed by reality. The main characters are clearly self-references: students and teachers of literature. He worries about deploying spaces with few words, his books do not exceed 120 pages

4 comments:

  1. I will read your book one of these days, thanks to recommendation!

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  2. When I was a secondary school student, my spanish teacher had been Zambra's classmate. They both studied literature in our university, at the other side of the campus.

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  3. someone else tell me the same, and I read in the biography.

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