From Alejandro Zambra, Bonsai is a book about love and literature, and about love being expressed through the shared experience of literature. It tells the doomed story of two young Chilean students, Emilio and Julia, who meet at a party and soon become lovers. We know their story is doomed because, in a postmodern twist à la Martin Amis’s London Fields, we are told so on the first page.
Unlike London Fields, Alejandro Zambra’s book is written with stark simplicity, told through short vignettes that give us glimpses of the whole, and this sparsity is what gives Bonsai its cumulative power. We observe almost voyeuristically as the two young lovers slowly find themselves and each other through the books they read together. Their relationship feels authentic and true, and there is a particularly touching moment where the couple pretends to be sharing a rereading of a great novel (by Proust, of course) that neither of them has read before.
Bonsai is not as formally innovative as some reviewers might have you believe, and the writing is sometimes too detached for the intimacy of the scenes it describes, but it still manages to pack an impressive amount of emotional heft within its brief pages.
Bonsai, Alejandro Zambra [trans. Megan McDowell] (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
Price: £9.99. Info: here
words JOSHUA REES
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