Ways of Going Home

I remember, as a child, sitting at our kitchen bench one morning before school and feeling an earthquake. I remember feeling our apartment gently moving, the low rumble, the rattling of the picture frames on the wall and the glasses on the table. It was a long way away from us, but yet we still felt it. I remember my parents switching on the radio not long after and listening to the news. And I remember these few, somewhat disconnected images like any child would, looking back upon their youth.

It is an earthquake, much like the one I recall as a child, that opens Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra’s latest novel, Ways of Going Home, a book that explores our memories and examines our recollections. This brief but beautifully written story is a literary and meta-literary account of Chile’s troubled past. It covers the Pinochet regime, which Zambra lived through, though he confesses he considers himself to be a ‘secondary character’ to his nation’s history.

We first meet our narrator as a boy, and then later as a young man falling in and out of love. He’s attempting to write a novel (a novel, in fact, much like the one we are reading) and remembering his childhood. Only we can’t help but sense his feelings of guilt – guilt at remembering, yet not fully comprehending, the events and later the consequences of what was happening around him in his youth.

Zambra’s work certainly blurs between fiction and memoir. It also only scratches the surface of exploring Chile’s darker history. This, for some, may be disappointing. Yet the strength of Zambra’s prose, his astute yet delicate clarity of observation and his unique voice consistently ring true. This is an intimate past revealed – one that will make us consider our own memories, which, for better or for worse, have shaped us into who we are today.

Nicole Mansour