Carolina de Robertis and Bonsai

On October 5 we're welcoming Carolina de Robertis as our first Lit&Lunch guest for the 2010-11 season (full lists of guests here).

Among other things, she'll be discussing Bonsai, a slim Chilean novel that she translated for Melville House in 2008 (and was published in 2009). The book had a huge impact on Chilean literature when it was originally published in Chile (many saw it as a countervailing trend to Roberto Bolano), and it was one of my favorite novels of 2009. Although it's a very short work, it's extremely complex, and it's unlike most of the books I read, translation or otherwise.

De Robertis' translation originally appeared in its entirety in the Virginia Quarterly Review, and you can read an excerpt of that translation here.

Her's what Chad Post, publisher of Open Letter Books, said about Bonsai and its author, Alejandro Zambra:

In my opinion, Zambra is the best of a generation of Chilean writers that has little or no unifying characteristic, a generation that is starting to experiment more than any other generation has in Chile. Zambra writes of Chilean novelists that “they, we, write from outside in, as if the novel were, really, the long echo of a suppressed poem. ” He makes no claims or attempts to be representative of his country or era, and in that lies the brightness of his writing: the simple endeavor to say something true along with the awareness of the relativity of that truth. Zambra’s “valid images” are delicate portraits are the everyday, and his books some of the most exciting of that recent category, Latin American literature.

And here's what The Nation wrote about the book:

When it was published in Spanish in 2006, Alejandro Zambra's novel Bonsai filled just ninety-four generously spaced pages, and its recent English translation by Carolina De Robertis stretches only to eighty-three. Still, each of these volumes should be considered a marvel of book design and production since in interviews the author has let slip that his original text ran only to forty sheets. 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. As the venerable Santiago newspaper El Mercurio commented in April 2008, "The publication of Bonsai...marked a kind of bloodletting in Chilean literature. It was said (or argued) that it represented the end of an era, or the beginning of another, in the nation's letters."

Reading the book a continent away, I would never have predicted such a fuss, though Bonsai is a delightful work. A love story that's both wry and melancholy, the novel opens in 1980s Santiago, at a study session turned party, where textbooks give way to vodka and two university students fall casually into bed. "Julio didn't like that Emilia asked so many questions in class," Zambra writes, "and Emilia disliked the fact that Julio passed his classes while hardly setting foot on campus, but that night they both discovered the emotional affinities that any couple is capable of discovering with only a little effort."