The Private Lives of Trees by Alejandro Zambra

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!

Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith

I first encountered Tracy K. Smith as editor for the excellent anthology The Best American Poetry 2021. Flash forward three years or so and, by pure coincidence, I received Wade in the Water as a gift. The book is a collection of Smith’s poems, divided into four distinct sections, each with something a little different to offer.

The subject matters and themes are mostly self-contained within each of the  four sections, though of course there are some areas of overlap. The first section takes on a more pastoral and reverent quality with personal anecdotes and connections blended in. The second section is a series of found poems that deal with the racist history of the United States, while the third takes a more environmental and political focus. The final section deals with family connection, and motherhood in particular.

Some of the early poems have great quotable lines and turns of phrase. In the poem “Garden of Eden,” Smith provides a blazon of delights before announcing that “Everyone I knew was living / The same desolate luxury, / Each ashamed of the same things: / Innocence of privacy” (5). The lines imbue the banality of life with a tragic quality, particularly with the phrase “desolate luxury” that hits right in the heart. The follow up poem, “The Angels,” offers rich imagery and builds towards an absence, all the more impactful for the richness that preceded it: “A rust-stained pipe / Where a house once stood, which I / Take each time I pass it for an owl. / Bright whorl so dangerous and near. // My mother sat whispering with it / At the end of her life / While all the rooms of our house / Filled up with night” (7). I adore the metonym (or is it the synecdoche?) of the pipe that intimates what is already gone, and the fact that the rooms “filled up with night” is a beautiful conclusion, since an absence (the darkness) is palpably filling up space.

In an unlikely turn of events for me, I actually found Smith’s longer works more compelling than the shorter ones, which passed by a little too quickly to make an impact. The second section of the collection capitalizes on her strength with long-form poems. It is worthwhile to quote from Smith’s “Notes” section to describe what she has done:

The text for “I Will Tell You the Truth about This, I Will Tell You All about It” is composed entirely of letters and statements of African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and those of their wives, widows, parents, and children. While the primary documents in question have been abridged, the poem preserves the original spellings and punctuation to the extent possible throughout. [...] Once I began reading these texts, it became clear to me that the voices in question should command all of the space within my poem. I hope that they have been arranged in such a way as to highlight certain of the main factors affecting blacks during the Civil War, chiefly: the compound effects of slavery and war upon the African American family; the injustices to which black soldiers were often subject; the difficulty black soldiers and their widows faced in attempting to claim pensions after the war; and the persistence, good faith, dignity, and commitment to the ideals of democracy that ran through the many appeals to President Lincoln, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and other authorities to whom petitions were routinely addressed during and after the war. (77-78)

Smith then gives a thorough list of the sources from which the poem is pulled. There are then a few pages of citations for the letters and depositions from which the poem was pulled. As Smith notes, the “original spellings and punctuation” have been preserved, spelling mistakes and all. Smith’s work as a poet becomes, essentially, a matter of arrangement, a collage. The work is cohesive in its voice and themes, despite being an amalgam of others. The poems on their own do not seem particularly “quotable” but then the narrative of the piece shines.

Similarly, the third section of the collection takes a more overtly political focus, especially with respect to the immigration discourse in the United States and the climate crisis. The longest poem in the third section is “Watershed,” which is similarly a found poem drawn from an article from January 6th, 2016 in the New York Times Magazine and excerpts of the narratives of survivors of near-death experiences. The poem has a gravitas that is difficult to ignore.

I have to appreciate writers that take on very different topics, so when the final section deals with motherhood, it’s a surprising and refreshing change. The poem “Dusk,” for example, shifts the tone of the collection. It deals with the tension between a mother and her child and the strange resentments that build. The poem begins with the question, “What woke to war in me those years / When my daughter had first grown into / A solid self-centered self?” (68). She then reflects on the minutiae that infuriate her: “I’d watch her / Sit at the table—well, not quite sit, / More like stand on one leg while / The other knee hovered just over the chair” (68). She suggests how her daughter wouldn’t lower herself in case of a fire “or a great black / Blizzard of waves let loose in the kitchen / And she’d need to make her escape” (68). Smith extrapolates this failure to sit into a larger, more existential idea that “She’d trust no one but herself, her own / New lean always jittering legs to carry her — / Where exactly? Where would a child go? To there. There alone” (68). The poem continues to explain the disconnect as personified with her resting an elbow on the table, bending her leg, not making eye contact. It leads to Smith’s existential crisis that she thought she’d have more time before her daughter grew up: “I thought / My body would have taken longer going / About the inevitable feat of repelling her” (68). It’s a great piece that highlights those small moments that are imbued with such significance for us.

Smith also does a good job of personifying concepts. For instance, the poem “New Road Station” gives life to history as a concept: “History is in a hurry. It moves like a woman / Corralling her children onto a crowded bus” (42). It documents her journey, “Hammering the driver’s headrest with her fist” (42). The world around her seems to be actively engaged in watching her, with flies “watching with their million eyes, never bored” and crows that “cluck and caw at the woman in their frenzy” (42). The poem takes a turn at its midpoint, though, announcing that “history is not a woman // And it is not the crowd forming in a square” (42). Smith deflates the enigma of history and then says how it is not even “the rapt silence of a room / Where a film of history is right now being screened” (42). There’s a clever interplay of No and Now at the core of the poem, rejecting and asserting. There’s then the inversal where history stops being the woman on the bus and instead is the bus “that will only wait so long / Before cranking its engine to barrel down // The road” (42). Smith opens up possibilities for what history could be that are more intimate and then redirects to a child’s views, curled up in his mother’s arm “who believes history must sleep inside a tomb, // Or the belly of a bomb” (42). The poem ends on that note, and I like that the rhyme does not quite work and I like that the zeugma links the ideas with a good deal of gravity. The fact that the belly of the bomb is the last line of the poem, and the only one not presented in a couplet, gives it added weight.

In another poem, “Charity,” the concept is personified again. It characterizes her “like a squat old machine, / Off-kilter but still chugging along / The uphill stretch of sidewalk / On Harrison Street, handbag slung / Crosswise and, I’m guessing, heavy” (64). The poem presents as a kind of parable for the concept where she “bend[s] forward to tussle with gravity” (64). Her feet are off-balance, seemingly fighting against each other, and her shoulders are braced “as if lashed / By step after step after step” (64). She stares unflinchingly. There’s a great twist at the end, though, presented in italics, where the hitherto unknown speaker of the poem responds to the idea of charity. She states, “I am you, one day out of five, / Tired empty, hating what I carry / But afraid to lay it down, stingy, / Angry, doing violence to others / By the sheer freight of my gloom, / Halfway home, wanting to stop, to quit / But keeping going mostly out of spite” (64). The speaker’s response to charity seems so deeply human in its contradictions. There’s the resentment of doing good, of hating what you carry but not being able to lay it down. I think the anger that emerges from the “sheer freight of [...] gloom” feels sincere and authentic, and using spite as a motivator to keep going rings true in its vulnerability.

Taken together, these poems form what I see as a good collection. The project is interesting; even when the poems individually don’t “do it” for me, the concept and craftsmanship of their assemblage is a noble project. Smith’s personality emerges with such lovely sincerity and honesty in the more personal poems and passionate insight in the political ones. It’s not likely to be the most memorable collection I’ve ever read, but it’s worth your time—it’s likely only to take an afternoon, anyhow.

Happy reading!