A Review of The Chilean Poet

I mentioned previously that I was going to post a review of The Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra, and that day is today.

First, I must say that I would have done it sooner, but it is May. I have huge chamomile plants that survived from last year that are starting to bloom and you have to stay on top of picking the flowers at the right time to dry for tea and such. I have been busy with that and in general yardwork like mowing and I am going to have to start watering the tomatoes and everything tomorrow morning because it is supposed to stay warm and dry for a while.

And Yena is finishing up school this week, had a swim meet this past weekend, and her track and field banquet last night at the school. She has the 7th grade school record for the 800 meter run and was very close to making it to state. We are going to start running together again more next week once she is on break.

Okay, I got off topic there, didn't I? So, The Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra was a novel that I enjoyed. It is written in third person, but at the end of the novel, you know I thought who is the narrator? I would like to meet this person. The narrator and I suppose the characters too in some ways poke fun a bit at the idea that Chile is only famous for its poetry and poets because two Chilean poets have won the Nobel Prize. It talks about this idea as a society that no one really likes poetry or cares about the poets, but almost everyone is a poet and there is this group/society of poets on society's fringes who have this twisted or almost alternative view of reality compared to the norm. It is an interesting view of Chilean culture.

But really the focus of the story is about Gonzalo and his relationship with Carla that was hot and heavy when they were in high school and broke up after they started having sex because Carla found it too painful. They met again six years later and is the start of a serious relationship full of sex, but also Gonzalo finds out that Carla has a six-year-old son, Vicente. Gonzalo becames a stepdad to Vicente, and the reader if not reading in the original Spanish or doesn't know a lot about the Spanish langauge, that the word for stepdad in Spanish has a negative connotation. The story follows how Gonzalo learns to accept this role and the word despite the ideas and feelings behind the word.

As some years pass, the relationship between Gonzalo and Carla ends when Gonzalo goes to New York to study and leaves Vicente behind too. There is basically no communication for a long time until they randomly meet in a bookstore in Santiago shortly before Vicente's nineteenth birthday. The story leaves you with this idea that they are going to "live happily ever after" as stepfather and stepson again, but the narrator states that he cannot promise that or knows. It leaves you wanting to know, but as a writer of novels myself, I understand how the narrator (the author) can't know for sure even though the characters are his creation because the characters let you know what they are doing, what they want, and they are busy living thier lives.

There are a lot of things that I am skipping from the plot of this novel including the mention of several Chilean poets and others that as a reader makes you go, "maybe I should check some of them out." I am really bad at reading poetry though and understanding the underlying meanings or what words are saying. For example, Walt Whitman's Leaves and Grass is full of poems that are quite sexual in nature that I wouldn't have realized or seen without reading the commentaries or notes that others have written. I am not saying poetry isn't beautiful or that it doesn't speak to me, but I feel like it is almost like learning to speak another language to truly fully grasp sometimes.

With this all being said, in conclusion, I do recommend reading The Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra!