Chilean Poet

 by Alejandro Zambra

Granta (2022)

Reviewed by Amanda Vilanova

Chile, the Land of Poets, has produced the likes of Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral and Nicanor Parra. In his novel Chilean Poet, Alejandro Zambra skilfully gives the reader a glimpse into the life of modern, aspiring poets; particularly, the humour and humanity of it all.  

Our first would-be poet, Gonzalo, is introduced to us as a literature-obsessed, sonnet-writing teenager who, after a chance encounter with his dream girl, Carla, manages to become her boyfriend. Their first attempt at love doesn’t quite work out, but they find each other years later under different circumstances. Carla is now a single mother with a six-year-old son named Vicente and Gonzalo becomes a member of the family. Initially, the novel chronicles Gonzalo’s career as a scholar and aspiring writer as well as the events of his unconventional family. Their life together unravels before us in images of everyday moments that are engrossing and beautifully constructed:

…they were completely amenable to the eternal repetition of a life that, especially on nights like that one, captivated them…beautified by belly laughs, they were even capable of savouring the words that opened and intermingled as if they were newly learned: ritual, routine, redo, rite, route.

Through Gonzalo, Zambra explores the nature of living in between worlds and relationships. Gonzalo is a carer but not a father, a critic but not a writer, a scholar, but not a poet. 

A leap in time shifts our attention to Vicente, now a young adult with a passion for poetry. Vicente meets Pru, a heartbroken American journalist who has travelled to Santiago on an assignment. Vicente introduces her to his literary circle, and she decides to make them the focus of her writing. Pru’s journey is an insight into the almost laughable rivalry between poets aiming to be the best at a famously ineffable artform. She meets emerging and established poets along the way who are blessed (or cursed) with varying degrees of eccentricity ranging from the writing of thousand-page books to a poet who insists on radical anonymity, but everyone has his phone number. The novel makes poetry’s significance in Chilean history and its current relevance crystal clear; some of the poets Pru meets throw around sentences such as, ‘Being a Chilean poet is like being a Peruvian chef or Brazilian soccer player or a Venezuelan model’. This world is explored with such playfulness that the author, rather than alienating us, brings us closer to these artists. 

The story moves at an enticing pace, with each chapter starting mid-action and drawing you in, and the characters are wonderfully relatable. The prose makes you smile with descriptions of love, attraction and heartbreak shining with every turn of the page, a sign of the excellent quality of Megan McDowell’s translation. The literary references abound, compelling the reader to make a list of all the Latin American giants they must devour once they finish.

Put simply, Chilean Poet presents characters attempting to love others and their art. They, like so many of us, try and fail and then, courageously, do it all over again. You leave their world feeling that our trying and failing is well worth it, even when things don’t turn out quite how we expected.