A test for humankind

Reviewed by Stephen Phelan

CHILEAN critics went nuts for Alejandro Zambra’s slim debut novel, Bonsai, in 2006. Barely 30 at the time, Zambra was tagged the voice of the post-Pinochet generation. Born and raised under the dictatorship, his writing seemed fast, loose and joyous in the present age of nominal democracy. But his evident faith in literature was also marked and scarred by doubts and second-guessings.

He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell the story straight, couching it in quote marks and meta-text – a simple tale of two young lovers complicated by their aspirational relationship to fiction, and their rhetorical existence within its frameworks.

Zambra’s mode of postmodernism was nothing especially new but it came off fresh all the same, and more generous to the reader than such exercises tend to be. To pick up Bonsai, or his later, better novel Ways Of Going Home, or his recent short story collection My Documents, was to feel yourself befriended by way of chatty, pleasurable prose.

Now comes his latest experiment, Multiple Choice, which tries to fit the fullness or roundness of life and literature into the square boxes of the standardised test format. Each section asks a set of questions and lists a number of possible answers.

To pick an early one at random, under the heading “silence”, which of the following words bears no relation to the meaning of that word or the others listed: A) fidelity, B) complicity, C) loyalty, D) conspiracy, E) cowardice?

Later comprehension sections become more elaborate. A father’s letter to his son reflects on their estrangement and recounts an illegal abortion in the ultra-Catholic conservative Chile of Pinochet’s regime. As per the follow-up questions, should that father be considered “honest and brave”, or “pathetic and waiting to die”, or “an exhibitionist guy who crosses the line … on the pretext of asking forgiveness”?

Another lengthy passage tells a mini-story of a couple on their wedding day in the context of the dictatorship’s protracted refusal to legalise divorce. Among the possible answers below, it’s suggested that this policy neutralised public outcry for more radical reforms.

Zambra took 20 years over this short volume – diligently translated by Megan McDowell – playing with a copy of the actual university entrance exam he sat in 1993. There’s real weight to it even as he picks so lightly over the damage done to his own peers and their parents. His fellow high-school students included sons and daughters of the tortured and disappeared, as well as children whose own fathers applied the electrodes. The truth was subject to the government junta for all of the author’s young life, the concept of education circumscribed and perverted, the population grouped into tickable boxes. Right or left, pro or anti, military or civilian.

But Zambra’s field of enquiry overspills the historical and political. It spreads far beyond Chilean borders and slips the bounds of narrative to question the very idea of a single, correct and definitive answer. Is this fiction? Theory? Poetry? Philosophy? The author invites you to file it wherever you like.