Bonsai

Bonsai is the story of Julio and Emilia, two young Chilean students who, seeking truth in great literature, find each other instead. Like all young couples, they lie to each other, revise themselves, and try new identities on for size, observing and analyzing their love story as if it’s one of the great novels they both pretend to have read. As they shadow each other throughout their young adulthoods, falling together and drifting apart, Zambra spins a formally innovative, metafictional tale that brilliantly explores the relationship among love, art, and memory.

‘The “last truly great book” I read has to be Alejandro Zambra’s Bonsai. A subtle, eerie, ultimately wrenching account of failed young love in Chile among the kind of smartypant set who pillow-talk about the importance of Proust.... A total knockout.’ — Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, ‘Every beat and pattern of being alive becomes revelatory and bright when narrated by Alejandro Zambra. He is a modern wonder.’ — Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch, ‘Rather than shrink in its conversion to bound covers, as most manuscripts do, Zambra’s text has swelled–and its effect on the world of Chilean literature has been entirely disproportionate to its size.’ — Marcela Valdes, The Nation, ‘The most talked-about writer to come out of Chile since Bolaño.’ — New York Times, ‘Strikingly original.’ — James Wood, New Yorker

Alejandro Zambra is the author of the novels Chilean Poet, Multiple Choice, Ways of Going Home, The Private Lives of Trees, and Bonsai; the short story collection, My Documents, a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award; and Not to Read, a collection of essays. The recipient of numerous literary prizes, as well as a Cullman Center fellowship, his stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, The White Review and Harper’s, among others. He lives in Mexico City.