She came from the United States straight to my house in Buenos Aires — they didn’t want her in some hotel while they looked for an apartment to rent. My gringa cousin, Julie: she’d been born in Argentina, but when she was two, her parents — my aunt and uncle — had migrated to the States. They settled in Vermont: my uncle worked at Boeing, and my aunt — my dad’s sister — birthed children, decorated the house, and secretly held spiritist meetings in her beautiful, spacious living room. Rich blond Latinos of German heritage: their neighbors didn’t really know how to place them, since they came from South America but their last name was Meyer. Even so, their firstborn’s features betrayed the infiltrated strain of Native blood that came from my Indigenous grandmother: Julie had the dark dead eyes of a rat, untamable hair always standing on end, skin the color of wet sand. I’m pretty sure my aunt even started telling people she was adopted. My dad got so mad when he heard that rumor that he stopped writing and calling his sister for at least a year.
Y_our story in this week’s issue, “The Size of Things,” involves an adult who seems to regress to childhood. Should we read it as a supernatural story or a metaphorical one?_
There is a gesture at the end toward the fantastic, it’s true, but it’s only a wink, and the story could all be read as merely a feeling of the narrator’s. It could be the story of an adult man trying to escape his mother’s control, who, in his desperation, becomes infantilized and takes refuge with another family. Really, if there is anything beyond that, it’s an idea that I’d like to trigger in the reader’s mind, but that isn’t formally written on the page.
We have the sense that Enrique’s mother has resisted his growing up—that she tries to keep him a child by asserting her power over him, physically and verbally. Is that what’s going on?
Yes. Even though we only actually meet that possessive and authoritarian mother in the final lines, it’s something that we can gradually deduce from Enrique himself, from the beginning of the story.
Do you think the couple who run the toy store are complicit in what happens to Enrique—or just innocent observers?
Their intentions are good, but they end up being passive accomplices to Enrique Duvel’s regression. Maybe it’s because for them it’s easier to deal with a child than with an adult, or maybe—because they seem to be a childless couple—they have a need to care for someone else, to feel needed themselves. In any case, it’s a strange relationship that clearly fills a need for all three of them.
Were you thinking of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” when you wrote this?
I wasn’t thinking of it, but, it’s true, the two pieces have points in common. It did occur to me, rereading the story for this publication, that the last line is very much like the ending of Roald Dahl’s story “The Man from the South”: both narrators have a revelation while looking at another character’s hand. And it’s strange because “The Size of Things” is an old story—I must have been twenty-two or twenty-three when I wrote it, and I read Roald Dahl many years later. I love it when those things happen. I like to think that at some point Roald and I passed through the same place—some corner of the collective unconscious—that caught our attention in a similar way.
In Argentina, the story appeared as part of a collection of stories, in which many things are not exactly what they seem or undergo transformations. Is the idea of metamorphosis important to your work?
Yes, it was for that book in particular. Writing it, I was at a stage when I felt as though ideas, to be strong, needed the power of more classic forms. It was a learning stage—though I’m still learning, really. But I do feel that, although the things I’m interested in writing about haven’t changed in the slightest, the forms through which I approach them have, and doors have gradually opened.
Do you have any models when you’re writing short stories? Any favorite stories you keep going back to?
I have my list of favorite stories, of course, although it changes every year. But I am fairly intuitive in my writing, and I feel that the clues to how each story should be written lie within the idea for the story itself. Even so, I think that past readings, even the stories I have ostensibly forgotten, are always there working silently in my mind—even if, when I sit down to write, I’m not thinking of them directly.
Your novel “Fever Dream” was recently published in the U.S. How does the experience of being published here differ from your experience in Argentina?
Being translated into English, for a young Latin American author, is a kind of prize; in the eyes of Spanish-speaking critics and readers, it’s almost a consecration. And this, along with the novel’s nomination for the Man Booker International Prize, has given it an unexpected push, which likewise led to translations into other languages. If the book had remained in the Spanish-speaking world only, it would have been difficult for it to reach so many readers. So I feel very grateful for and happy about everything that has happened since the book’s English translation.
(Translated, from the Spanish, by Megan McDowell.)
That summer the electricity went out for six-hour stretches on the government’s orders; the country didn’t have any more energy, they said, though we didn’t really understand what that meant. Our parents couldn’t get over how the Minister of Public Works had announced the measures necessary to avoid a widespread blackout from a room lit only by a hurricane lamp: like in a slum, they repeated. What would a widespread blackout be like? Would we remain in the dark forever? That possibility was incredible. Stupid. Ridiculous. Useless adults, we thought, how useless. Our mothers cried in the kitchen because they didn’t have enough money or there was no electricity or they couldn’t pay the rent or inflation had eaten away at their salaries until they didn’t cover anything beyond bread and cheap meat, but we girls – their daughters – didn’t feel sorry for them. Our mothers seemed just as stupid and ridiculous as the power outages. Meanwhile, we had a van. It belonged to Andrea’s boyfriend. Andrea was the prettiest of all of us, the one who knew how to rip up jeans to make fabulous cutoffs, and wore crop tops that she bought with money she stole from her mother. The boyfriend’s name doesn’t matter. He had a van he used to deliver groceries during the week, but on weekends it was all ours. We smoked some poisonous pot from Paraguay that smelled like urine and pesticide but was cheap and effective. The three of us would smoke and then, once we were totally out of our minds, we’d get into the back of the van, which didn’t have windows or any light at all because it wasn’t designed for people, it was made to transport cans of garbanzos and peas. We would have him drive really fast, then slam on the brakes, or go around and around the traffic island at the city’s entrance. We had him speed up around corners and make us bounce over speed bumps. And he did it all because he was in love with Andrea and he hoped that one day she would love him back. We would shout and fall on top of each other; it was better than a roller coaster and better than alcohol. Sprawled in the darkness, we felt like every blow to the head could be our last and, sometimes, when Andrea’s boyfriend had to stop because he got held up at a red light, we sought each other out in the darkness to be sure we were all still alive. And we roared with laughter, sweaty, sometimes bloody, and the inside of the truck smelled of empty stomachs and onions, and sometimes of the apple shampoo we all shared. We shared a lot: clothes, the hair dryer, bikini wax. People said that we were similar, that the three of us looked alike, but that was just an illusion because we copied each other’s movements and ways of speaking. Andrea was beautiful, tall, with thin and separated legs; Paula was too blond and turned a horrible shade of red when she spent too long in the sun; I could never manage a flat belly or thighs that didn’t rub together – and chafe – when I walked.
Alejandro Zambra is one of our favorite living writers. His first book, "Bonsai", won the Chilean Critics' Award for Best Novel of the Year in 2006. We first read his work when Farrar, Straus and Giroux published "Ways of Going Home" in 2013.
Alejandro Zambra is one of our favorite living writers. His first book, Bonsai, won the Chilean Critics' Award for Best Novel of the Year in 2006. We first read his work when Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Ways of Going Home in 2013. What distinguishes Alejandro from his contemporaries is the sweetness and intimacy of his writing, and his confidence in letting himself be as he is. As you read his work, there's never the impression that he is second-guessing himself, thinking, "So-and-so would do it this way," or "Such-and-such editor would say that." He exhibits this remarkable confidence on the page, one that allows him to be himself and to speak, a special kind of generosity. It feels like knowing and speaking to a sweetheart—it never feels like he's an author who pretends, or tries to teach, or falls into egotistical traps. Flaws in writing often come from flaws in character. Alejandro doesn't seem to have any of those. He's just a lovely, special, strange person who seems to look at his actual world and describe it in his actual, natural voice, and he leaves it at that. He has the authority that J. M. Coetzee, V. S. Naipaul, and Bret Easton Ellis have all identified as the writer's bedrock.
