This book! Impressive and engaging.

I've long been intimidated by Chilean Poet - after all, I have but cursory knowledge of Chilean poets; really, of poetry worldwide. And yet, author Alejandro Zambra and translator Megan McDowell pulled me right in.

Ultimately this is a book about a father-son relationship, though it's about poetry and finding one's way, too. I'm glad I read it for the ending alone.

I'm a big fan of Alejandro Zambra. His narrative structure is always unorthodox and clever. One of his books had a test format (Multiple Choice) as a narrative tool. Chilean Poet uses a traditional method to tell the story of love, poetry, and fathers and sons. The title is a nod to the strong Chilean Poet tradition, such as Neruda, Bolano, and others, but also how many poets struggle with its creation.

Gonzalo and Carla are inseparable, but one day they break up. Six years later, they reunite, but Carla has a six-year-old child. Is the child Gonzalo's? He takes the child on like he is his son and vice versa. When Carla gets cold feet about Gonzalo, she kicks him out and ends his relationship with her son Vincente. Another 12 years pass by, and Gonzalo and Vincente reunited. They do not have a solid familial connection, so they bond over their love of poetry.

Even though they are unrelated, the connection between father and son is intense. The need to create a new relationship with your child as an adult can be very difficult and demonstrates how rewarding that can be in this narrative.

What makes up a family? What are the moments we remember? The poetry of the mundane (not the famous) keeps the connection to one another.

Favorite Passages:

… that the world of Chilean poets is a little stupid but it's still more genuine, less false than the ordinary lives of people who follow the rules and keep their heads down. Of course there is opportunism and cruelty, but also real passion and heroism and allegiance to dreams. She thinks that Chilean poets are stray dogs and stray dogs are Chilean poets and that she herself is a Chilean poet, poking her snout into the trash cans of an unknown city—she likes to think of herself as a Chilean poet, a Chilean poet who is neither poet nor Chilean, but whose journalistic pilgrimage in search of a break, her always frustrated dream of publishing in the big magazines or at least writing a noteworthy and resonant piece, somehow unites her with those men and especially those women who skulk in the alleyways of myth and desire.

Those aren't the kinds of photos he is looking for, though. What he wants is the more casual record of daily life—he wants to recover images of Vicente playing with Darkness in the yard or blowing out candles on a birthday cake or walking in the park; he wants, above all, to recall the afternoons of boredom suddenly animated by the temptation of posing for the camera, for the future; that bold assurance, that blind and audacious wager on a future that is compatible with the present.


He looks for it and intends to reread it, though he's not sure he likes it, and as he is flipping through the pages he finds another poem, "Rodrigo Tomas Growing Up," which the poet dedicated to his three-year-old son. He is left paralyzed by those verses, which he already knew, but only now, under the threatening clarity of the present, does he isolate and absorb them: For your freedom, I gave you glorious snow and guiding star. I was your sentinel watching over you at dawn. I see me still, like a tree, breathing for your nascent lungs, freeing you from the chase and the seizure of beasts. Oh my son, son of my arrogance, I will always be atop that Andean scene a knife in each hand to defend you and save you. Would he have defended Vicente with a knife in each hand? Would he have given everything to save him, to protect him? Of course he would have, he answers himself. He did, in a way. He devoted himself to raising Vicente, to caring for him, but then he let time and distance do their work. He would still defend him, would still take a bullet for him, he would still rather die himself than let Vicente die. He would sacrifice himself. Wouldn't he?


He wouldn't want Gonzalo to get back together with Carla, but maybe he does want Gonzalo to exist again. For Carla and Gonzalo to exist in completely separate, parallel worlds, just as they do now. And to have access to both of those worlds. No more than that, no less.

Hopefully they don't lose touch. That would be the closest thing to a happy ending, and I'd like to go on writing until I reach a thousand pages, just to be sure that at least for those thousand pages Gonzalo and Vicente don't lose touch, but that would be to condemn them, rob them of life, of will, because it's possible that they want to stop seeing each other, and that for one of them, probably Vicente, or maybe for them both, it would be for the best. I don't know, we're never going to know, because this ends here, this ends well, the way so many books we love would end if we tore out their final pages. The world is falling to pieces and everything almost always goes to shit and we almost always hurt the people we love or they hurt us irreparably and there doesn't seem to be a reason to harbor any kind of hope, but at least this story ends well, ends here, with the scene of these two Chilean poets who look each other in the eye and burst out laughing and don't want to leave that bar for anything, so they order another round of beers.

A love letter to Chilean poets and poetry, Alejandro Zambra’s latest is a full-blown novel, unlike many of his previous novella-length works of fiction. The novel, broken into four parts (Early Poems, Step-Poet, How to Become a Chilean Poet, and Poet-Ship), is written in third person. An interrupting ‘I’ slips in, now and then, reminding us that Zambra is a Chilean novelist, “and … Chilean novelists write novels about Chilean poets.” Zambra is also a Chilean novelist known for his metafictional sleights of hand, and that ‘I’ is the deft trick in Chilean Poet. By far my favorite section of the book is Poet-Ship, wherein ex-stepfather and ex-stepson reunite via, what else, poetry.

[Thanks to PENGUIN GROUP Viking and NetGalley for an opportunity to read an advanced reader copy of this book.]

Hailed as the ‘Land of Poets’, Chile has a long, enthusiastic tradition of embracing both poetry as an art form as well as the men and women who produce it. From Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, Nobel laureates both, to other renown practitioners such as Nicanor Parra, Gonzalo Rojas, and Vicente Huidobro, the country has certainly produced more than its share of world-class poets over the past century. The national obsession is such that even some of the most notable literary fiction produced by Chilean writers has focused on the lives of poets along with the joys and frustrations of the craft they practice. Roberto Bolaño’s electric novel The Savage Detectives is a great example of that devotion.

That background is useful to appreciate what Alejandro Zambra attempts in Chilean Poet, a book that couples a tender story of a fractured family of would-be writers living in modern-day Santiago with an homage to the scores of artists, past and present, who represent the country’s poetic heartbeat. The tale begins with Gonzalo and Carla, young working-class people, trying unsuccessfully to make a love affair survive. After separating for several years, they unexpectedly reunite and live together. This reunion includes Vicente, Carla’s young son from an earlier marriage. Gonzalo, struggling to launch his career as a poet, slides easily into the role of Vicente’s stepfather, despite not being married to Carla. When Gonzalo gets accepted to a graduate school in the United States, the couple breaks up once again, an event that sets Vicente on a path to find another home with the city’s poetry community. The story ends with Gonzalo and Vicente trying to find their way back into each other’s life after many years apart.

I enjoyed so many parts of this novel, which I found to be a moving reflection on what being part of a family truly means as well as a nice immersion into the Chilean poetry world. Zambra writes with obvious affection for his characters, especially Gonzalo and Vicente, and he deftly mixes humor with candid observations of both the good and bad sides of personal relationships in telling his story. There seems to be a clear connection to Bolaño’s earlier work, which is structured somewhat similarly, but Chilean Poet offers the reader a much more personal and relatable tale. If there is a shortcoming in the narrative, it would be that nothing much in the way of action occurs, aside from the principal characters walking the streets of Santiago and going into the city’s numerous restaurants, bars, and bookstores. Also, despite incessant conversation about the topic, there is relatively little actual poetry contained in the volume. Nevertheless, this is an engaging book by a talented author that I can happily recommend.

An aspiring poet reunites with his high school girlfriend and becomes a father to her stepson only to have it all go wrong again leaving him with guilt and misgivings.