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Farrar, Straus and Giroux
January 2013
On Sale: January 8, 2013
160 pages
ISBN: 0374286647
EAN: 9780374286644
Kindle: B008PBYUNO
Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction Family Life
Alejandro Zambra’s Ways of Going Home begins with an
earthquake, seen through the eyes of an unnamed
nine-year-old boy who lives in an undistinguished
middleclass housing development in a suburb of Santiago,
Chile. When the neighbors camp out overnight, the
protagonist gets his first glimpse of Claudia, an older girl
who asks him to spy on her uncle Raúl. In
the second section, the protagonist is the writer of the
story begun in the first section. His father is a man of few
words who claims to be apolitical but who quietly
sympathized—to what degree, the author isn’t sure—with the
Pinochet regime. His reflections on the progress of the
novel and on his own life—which is strikingly similar to the
life of his novel’s protagonist—expose the raw suture of
fiction and reality. Ways of
Going Home switches between author and character, past
and present, reflecting with melancholy and rage on the
history of a nation and on a generation born too late—the
generation which, as the author-narrator puts it, learned to
read and write while their parents became accomplices or
victims. It is the most personal novel to date from Zambra,
the most important Chilean author since Roberto Bolaño.
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