And Zambra’s latest novel represents, I think, his deepest achievement. Clancy Martin Review“Funny, contemplative, and quietly moving, Ways of Going Home pulls off the intoxicating trick of making the world feel smaller in its familiar touchstones found in a time of unique tragedy.”-Chris Barton, The Los Angeles Times“ are written with startling talent.

His voice is as natural and intimate as Roberto Bolaño's, an obvious but healthy influence, and his subjects-love, memory, death, and guilt-are as big as he can find. It is the most personal novel to date from Zambra, the most important Chilean author since Roberto Bolaño.From BookforumWays of Going Home elevates Zambra to the status of living writers we 'simply must read,' like Denis Johnson, Lydia Davis, and Mary Gaitskill. 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. 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. 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. 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.

Ways of Going Home by Alejandro Zambra