A slim yet charming coming-of-age story during the Pinochet regime. Through the eyes of the seven-year old protaginist, readers will uncover a fleeting sense of nostalgia that time may well have buried. The translation by Elizabeth Breyer is as seamless as it is clear.

I was judging the L.A. Times 2020 and 2021 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’d been doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got me to read on even though it was among 296 other books I’m charged to read.

I read this novel in one sitting in the midst of a snowstorm. It’s hilarious and attentive and brilliant and poignant.

Example:
The final resort was my on the brink of tears gaze. And that was the most intense of all. If the person in charge focused on my pupils instead of encountering me, he or she encountered every possible form of fragility: world hunger, ice sculptures that, after so much effort, were reduced to water, the soviet space-dog Laika turning around and around and around in the long night of infinity. All things had come to inhabit those small dark circles. Because that was the nature of life: to be small and dark.

With a tone that shimmers like a lyrical fable, this novel (translated from the Spanish by Elizabeth Bryer) explores coming of age in Chile during the 1970s. This era was marked by violent power struggles, disappearances, and community disorder. A wise and tender first-person voice invites readers to follow the coming of age of a vulnerable and sensitive young girl, M. Her father, D, is a traveling salesman, and the narrator tags along to remote backwaters and small towns. She witnesses many things, and describes her journeys with poetic images and leaps of imagination. An undercurrent of tension weaves throughout, due to M's mother's unexplained absence. This jewel of a novel swept me away, into a vast ocean of hidden history and lyrical possibility. I picked up the book and read it again, and just may seek out the Spanish original. I will shelve this next to Neruda and Isabel Allende.

A fantastic, accessible choice for book groups desiring literature in translation. Offers many pathways for discussion in World Literature classrooms, or for community "one read" programs.

the burden of memory. This book made me sad and I wasn't sure I could finish it. I am sure many will like it but I was not one. I do think it would be a great teaching book however.

How to Order the Universe by María José Ferrada, translated by Elizabeth Bryer is told from a child's perspective – “M”, a child who idealizes her father but whose idealism is one day shattered. Presumably, it is her attempt at seeing an order to her own universe. The ending leaves me wondering what happens in the future which is a statement to the success of the story and the storytelling.

Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2021/09/how-to-order-universe.html

Reviewed for NetGalley.

In 1970s Chile, M is a young girl who idolizes her salesman father, D, doing whatever she can to spend time with him on sales calls. As they grow closer, M starts skipping school to help out her dad, as he's found that a cute kid can really help move the product and she loves meeting the people he interacts with. One of those people, E, is a mysterious photographer, whose involvement in their lives threatens to upend a lifestyle that M has come to love.

What a quirky, haunting, and ultimately unsettling novella. With a tip of a hat to Paper Moon, Ferrada's sparse writing and characterization of M is pitch perfect. Well worth the short while it will take to read.

A well written book full of emotion and great imagery. One thing that bothers me is naming the characters one letter, that just annoys me in any book. Why? It’s more distracting than actual names.

Overall M was a good character and the story really kept the reader engrossed. The story had a huge dose of surrealism which I can appreciate.

I didn't completely understand this book. It was well-written, and I read it in one sitting, but it didn't really leave much of an impression on me. To be honest, I forgot most of it as soon as I had finished it.

Give it a try, especially if you liked "Ordinary Girls," "Aristotle & Dante," or anything by Jeanette Winterson. But I don't think this book will work for everyone.

Happy Pub day to How to Order the Universe by María José Ferrada and translated by Elizabeth Bryer.

This book is about M, a young girl in Chile who accompanies her father D, a traveling salesman, on his sales calls. It’s told from the perspective of an older M, as she looks back on that period in her life and the lessons she learned while on the road, the ones that helped bring order to an unordered life.

I’ve spent a couple of days trying to gather my thoughts on this book. Ferrada does a great job capturing a child’s logic and thought process, like the way M uses her knowledge of tools from her father’s sales catalog to form her own creation story for the world. M herself is an interesting character because she has those moments of childhood whimsy but she’s also very shrewd as a result of her travels with her father. She understands that people will respond emotionally when presented with a certain situation and how to manipulate that to her and her father’s advantage to make a better sale. It’s an odd combination that drives home the ways that children are much more complex and insightful than people ever give them credit for.

Ferrada truly packs a lot into these pages. In the background of M and D’s story is the socio-political unrest that is running through the country, one that disappears people and has those left behind looking for their ghosts. The finding of those ghosts is what disrupts the life M had created for herself, forcing her to grow up and leave it all behind. One she couldn’t return to when she was older and the truth too long in the open.

How to Order the Universe makes you relive those feelings of childhood wonder and innocence while also reminding you that there’s no going back to what was. It asks you to honor and cherish those memories as you leave them behind to grow into someone new.

Thank you to #netgalley for the ARC!

Childhood doesn't grant us much in the way of agency, so when M's mother doesn't have much interest in her M builds a life with her father as his sales assistant. M creates a system that uses what she knows to explain her world, but her knowledge isn't grounded in reality and eventually falls apart. A sad little book about the vagaries of life in Pinochet's Chile.

This intense novel shows a child’s perception of what is happening in Chile during the Pinochet-era. M travels with her father, a salesman. As his sidekick, she’s responsible for “guilting” the hardware suppliers into buying from her father. But when they meet a photographer, identified as “E” the lives of both father and daughter are put in danger. Escaping from a night of gunfire M finds herself alone and M returns to her mother. Ferrada has published several children’s novels. This is her debut adult title, and she understands children, in this unsettling, quickly read story.

𝑰 𝒍𝒊𝒌𝒆𝒅 𝒃𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒊𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒔𝒎𝒐𝒌𝒆 𝒇𝒓𝒐𝒎 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒊𝒓 𝒄𝒊𝒈𝒂𝒓𝒆𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒔. 𝑾𝒂𝒕𝒄𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒔𝒂𝒍𝒆𝒔𝒎𝒆𝒏 𝒐𝒓𝒅𝒆𝒓 𝒐𝒏𝒆 𝒄𝒐𝒇𝒇𝒆𝒆 𝒂𝒇𝒕𝒆𝒓 𝒂𝒏𝒐𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓. 𝑳𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒆𝒏𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒕𝒐 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒊𝒓 𝒍𝒊𝒆𝒔, 𝒕𝒊𝒎𝒆 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒂𝒈𝒂𝒊𝒏.

In María José Ferrada’s fictional coming of age, seven-year-old “M” tells us she has inherited the gift for persistence from her father. What better way to use it than to go on the road with her Dad “D”, a man who travels from town to town selling Kramp brand products to hardware stores. It only seems fitting a child born into a home made from said products would follow in her father’s footsteps, learning his finely honed skills. It is a partnership her mother is unaware has M dodging school and hitting the road with D. The youngest among the old-timers, she begins to shine in the middle of their universe, the coffeehouse and absorbs the ‘first laws of sales, and of life.’ Through the men and their polished lies, she is privy to the broken families, the roles they perfect to make a sale , their scams, comedies, dramas and their hard-knock life wisdoms. For her father, it’s about the money but for M it’s about expanding her small world and her comprehension of it. No one is a better teacher than D. Maybe too, it’s about feeling connected to someone.

M masters her role and obtains an education that has nothing to do with school. This early lesson in the art of a lie entails going home and deceiving her mother by letting her think she has been at school, rather than making a living alongside her daddy. D isn’t invested in fathering but as his employee they develop a bond little M can cling to. The novel takes place during Pinochet’s dictatorial reign in Chile, who left behind a brutal legacy, and may well be a piece to the puzzle of a mother who seems to be incomplete and sad. M’s tough, intelligent act can’t last forever when “E”, a photographer who hunts ghosts with his camera, disrupts the harmony of their routine. Nor can she fail to notice the strange effect he has on her mother. While she may not know what M and her father have been up to, there is a lot about her mother’s life before she gave birth to her that M is in the dark about. Like many children, she is blind about the dangerous world of grown ups and politics as much she fails to comprehend the foolish decisions of a father whose skills she greatly admires.

M’s place in the ‘floating family’ of salesman is threatened by events beyond her comprehension, and the bubble they’ve been living in is about to burst, putting distance between she and D. As time passes, so too does the charm of world she and her father shared on the road. M learns a strange lesson about time and space, that you can’t go back, that nothing is truly set in stone and it may be impossible to understand the innerworkings of things, especially one’s own father. How to Order the Universe is a father/daughter relationship on the edge of a cliff. It is about a clever, little girl whose bottomless emptiness she tries to fill with purpose by traveling on the road with her father.

Publication Date: February 16, 2021

Tin House

This was a fast read and it was a cute story. It was well written and quirky and I am happy that I got a chance to review this book!

I really tried to get into this because I love quirky, out of the box books but I just couldn't do it. It's a bit all over the place and it's hard to connect with the characters.