Author(s): Alejandro Zambra ; Megan McDowell (translator)

Short Stories | Read our reviews! | Chile | Translated fiction | Fitzcarraldo Editions

My Documents is the latest work from Alejandro Zambra, the award-winning Chilean writer whose first novel was heralded as the dawn of a new era in Chilean literature. Whether chronicling the attempts of a migraine-afflicted writer to quit smoking or the loneliness of the call-centre worker, the life of a personal computer or the return of a mercurial godson, this collection of stories evokes the disenchantments of youth and the disillusions of maturity in a Chilean society still troubled by its recent past. Written with the author's trademark irony and precision, humour and melancholy, My Documents is unflinchingly human and essential evidence of a sublimely talented writer working at the height of his powers.

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THOMAS'S REVIEW:
“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?

{THOMAS}