A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
A WALL STREET JOURNAL TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR
ONE OF NPR'S "BOOKS WE LOVE"
"A tender and funny story about love, family and the peculiar position
of being a stepparent...[Chilean Poet] broadens the author's scope
and quite likely his international reputation." --Los Angeles Times
"Zambra's books have long shown him to be a writer who, at the
sentence level, is in a world all his own." --Juan Vidal, NPR.org
A writer of "startling talent" (The New York Times Book Review),
Alejandro Zambra returns with his most substantial work yet: a story of
fathers and sons, ambition and failure, and what it means to make a
family
After a chance encounter at a Santiago nightclub, aspiring poet Gonzalo
reunites with his first love, Carla. Though their desire for each other
is still intact, much has changed: among other things, Carla now has a
six-year-old son, Vicente. Soon the three form a happy sort-of family--a
stepfamily, though no such word exists in their language.
Eventually, their ambitions pull the lovers in different directions--in
Gonzalo's case, all the way to New York. Though Gonzalo takes his books
when he goes, still, Vicente inherits his ex-stepfather's love of
poetry. When, at eighteen, Vicente meets Pru, an American journalist
literally and figuratively lost in Santiago, he encourages her to write
about Chilean poets--not the famous, dead kind, your Nerudas or Mistrals
or Bolaños, but rather the living, striving, everyday ones. Pru's
research leads her into this eccentric community--another kind of
family, dysfunctional but ultimately loving. Will it also lead Vicente
and Gonzalo back to each other?
In Chilean Poet, Alejandro Zambra chronicles with enormous tenderness
and insight the small moments--sexy, absurd, painful, sweet,
profound--that make up our personal histories. Exploring how we choose
our families and how we betray them, and what it means to be a man in
relationships--a partner, father, stepfather, teacher, lover, writer,
and friend--it is a bold and brilliant new work by one of the most
important writers of our time.
