I’ve been on an Alejandro Zambra kick, and after reading his Chilean Poet a few weeks ago, I’m returning to one of his short fictions, The Private Lives of Trees, a one hundred page novella that explores similar themes to his other works: family, parenthood, time, memory, the act of writing.
The initial premise of the story is that Julián is at home with his stepdaughter Daniela waiting for his wife Verónica to come home from class. As he waits, he watches a soccer game from years earlier where he vaguely remembers the ending and reflects on the stories he tells Daniela where trees are central characters. He thinks about how he and Verónica met and he thinks about Daniela’s future when she will one day turn 30.
There’s a seeming omniscient eye that hovers over the tale, like in Samuel Beckett’s short stories or in Haruki Murakami’s After Dark. This writerly omniscience provides a passage early on in the texts that casts a shadow, perhaps the shadow of death, over the rest of the novel:
“But this is not a normal night, at least not yet. It’s still not completely certain that there will be a next day, since Verónica isn’t back yet from her drawing class. When she returns, the novel will end. But as long as she is gone, the book will continue. The book goes on until she returns, or until Julián is sure that she isn’t going to return. For now, Verónica is absent from the blue room, where Julián lulls the little girl to sleep with a story about the private lives of trees” (6).
The text’s premise rests on this out-of-text construction that knows when the novel will end. Like in other of Zambra’s works, the line between fiction and reality is fraught with odd divisions. Here, we are pitched the idea that either Verónica will return or she won’t—something that the narrator would presumably know about yet expresses doubt or ambivalence to the issue. Partway through the novel, Julián develops some hypotheses. In the first, his wife faces two blown tires and is walking down the highway in search of help in the middle of the night. In the second, his wife is underneath her teacher, entangled in an amorous tryst from which she’ll never return. No one version is given primacy.
Zambra then does something interesting with time and fiction. His central character presents some options of what will happen to his stepdaughter in the future. He leaps to her life in five year intervals, which are not impacted by the loss of her mother. Whether or not she returns, Daniela’s life plays out the same way with her at thirty reconnecting with her father and dating a man named Ernesto. Julián’s fictions then blur around temporally; she “will” be living a certain way, but then she is, and then she was, and the verb tenses get jumbled so that even astute readers are left uncertain regarding what happens or will happen in reality and what is part of her stepfather’s stories.
This blend of temporal shifts is something that gives Zambra’s work its subversive power. It continually pushes at its own boundaries. Even when it comes to the private lives of trees, the stories that Julián tells Daniela as bedtime stories, there’s also a part about him in real life getting a bonsai tree that serves as a symbol of his own writing process. He writes hundreds and hundreds of pages and then scales back, eventually curating 40 pages of a novel, possibly composed of other peoples’ voices as they pass the window. This selective process gives shape to his own manicured writing. Yet, it’s worth pointing out that Zambra has another short novel called Bonsai which retains enough parallel here to cast doubt on their self-sufficiency as texts à la Beckett or Paul Auster (who is specifically referenced and derided in this text).
Throughout the book, I couldn’t shake the metafictional note that it ends when Verónica comes home or when Julián stops believing that she will. In the final pages of the novel, we return to the present (rather than the fast-forward of Daniela’s possibly-fictional life) and Julián is taking Daniela to school and it seems her mother has still not returned home. Her English teacher bombards them and says how Daniela needs to step up her efforts. Julián goes on an anti-imperial rant to voice his distaste for English. The English teacher schedules a parent-teacher interview for the following week. The novel ends with Julián taking Daniela’s hand lovingly and saying that they’ll have to study English more. She agrees but says she has to get to class. Her stepdad gives her a kiss and then lets her go. The end. To me, that implies that that is the moment he realizes that Verónica is never going to come back. We’re left with that ominous feeling of her absence but at the same time consoled by his clear love for his stepdaughter, making it seem as if the mother’s disappearance is immaterial. It’s an unusual sort of end, a precariously happy ending that sustains an ongoing mystery.
The Private Lives of Trees demonstrates some of Zambra’s tenderness towards characters and stylistic charm. Perhaps Chilean Poet spoiled me—as I mentioned in my review for it, I consider it essentially perfect—but The Private Lives of Trees is a good novel that just doesn’t quite hit the same heights. It’s very good, and well worth the afternoon it will take you to read it, but Zambra is operating in the shadow of his own greatness and that is a demanding task for any author. It may be apocryphal, but Joseph Heller was apparently once asked how he felt that he had never written a book better than Catch-22, to which he responded that nobody had written a book better than Catch-22. I feel a bit of that same spirit operating here.
Happy reading!
