Alejandro Zambra's 'My Documents'

Alejandro Zambra has given us no big fat Latin American novel, nothing like One Hundred Years of Solitude or The War of the End of the World. His longest work, a short story collection titled My Documents, is some two hundred and forty pages long (the page count here exceeds that of his four other English translated works by a considerable margin). Like Bolano, Zambra’s protagonists are often melancholic soloists; though unlike Bolano’s savage poets, Zambra’s men don’t become vagabonds, choosing instead to move on, getting in and out of love, taking care of their children (mistakes, probably), struggling with mediocrity in the onward march of History and Technology, and getting by, more or less.

In a beautiful short story in My Documents, a typical Zambra protagonist finds himself house-sitting for a distant cousin, who is traveling to France with his wife and daughter. Our man, adrift as he is, slowly grows to enjoy the appurtenances of the life that his cousin seems has built for himself—a comfortable house, a car, cereal in breakfast, so on. The protagonist’s state of mind, always ‘settling in’ as he is, is exemplified in the following passage: “Men from my generation don’t eat cereal, he thinks—unless their children eat it, unless they are fathers. When did they start eating cereal in Chile? The nineties? Suddenly, this question seems important.” Here is a man left behind, not keeping pace even with the simplest assertions of modernity in the social class he should have been a part of, from which he is excluded either because of foolhardy choices or uncontrollable twists in circumstances. He even gets a girlfriend after posing as the owner of the house he is taking care of. The story ends tragically for his love, of course, and Zambra is cruel enough to title the story Family Life.