Alejandro Zambra’s early novels are experimental yet warm portraits of ordinary Chileans confronting the impact of the nation’s cultural institutions. In Ways of Going Home (trans. Megan McDowell, FSG, 2013), the narrator wonders about his family’s complicity during the Pinochet dictatorship. Similarly, Multiple Choice (trans. Megan McDowell, Penguin, 2016) adopts the form of the Chilean college entrance exam to protest the neoliberal commodification of art and literature long after the “Chilean experiment” concluded. In his longest novel to date, Chilean Poet (trans. Megan McDowell, Viking, 2022), Zambra contends with the Chilean literary canon. Chilean Poet is a moving and winkingly referential depiction of two generations of writers who labor against the Chilean literati’s entrenched gender and class biases. While the novel compellingly portrays how the Chilean model of poet-patriarch can hamper the men it purports to benefit, Chilean Poet at times reinforces the literary masculinism it critiques. What emerges is an engaging portrait of a family as well as an exciting yet underdeveloped survey of the newest generation of Chilean writers.
Chilean Poet assembles a set of national writer-heroes as recognizable as the heads on Easter Island, only to jestingly consign them to obsolescence. At a literary salon, a young writer does an impression of “the odious Nerudian drone” (256), while the narrator derides Raúl Zurita as “the greatest blurb-maker of Chilean poetry and Latin American poetry and possibly the entire world” (195). Special ire is reserved for the mid-century avant-gardist poet Gonzalo Rojas, who ruins the chances that the protagonist, Gonzalo Rojas, can publish poetry under his own name. The novel opens with Gonzalo’s fevered search for a pseudonym, juxtaposing the nation’s reinvention with the protagonist’s. As Chile re-presents itself to the world as a democracy in the early 1990s, Gonzalo is less concerned with his country’s reinvention and more interested in his own. He thumbs through his personal library in search of a pen name:
After ruling out the silliest options (Gonzalo Rimbaud, Gonzalo Ginsberg, Gonzalo Pasolini, Gonzalo Pizarnik), he consolidated a short list with the names Gonzalo García Lorca, Gonzalo Corso, Gonzalo Grass, Gonzalo Li Po, and Gonzalo Lee Masters, but he couldn’t decide on any of them. Night was already falling when he thought of the pseudonym Gonzalo Pezoa, which would allow him to pay homage, simultaneously, to the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (who he hadn’t read but knew was great) and the Chilean poet Carlos Pezoa Véliz (who he liked a lot). (28)
McDowell’s spry translation conveys the knowing humor in Zambra’s Spanish, gently poking fun at Gonzalo’s grandiose references. If he can’t contend with the shadow of Gonzalo Rojas, perhaps his free verse will be better than Ginsberg’s, his symbolism denser than Rimbaud’s. Readers can already glimpse the politics of Gonzalo’s canon through this brief list. While he reads beyond Chilean forefathers like Enrique Lihn and Vicente Huidobro, the only woman’s name on the list (Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik’s) is quickly ruled to be among “the silliest options.”
Zambra sympathetically pairs Gonzalo’s teenage pompousness with a realistic assessment of his class. Compared to his wealthy girlfriend Carla, who lives in an upscale Santiago neighborhood, Gonzalo hails from a humble suburb. Despite these differences, Carla and Gonzalo reunite in adulthood as Gonzalo contends with a different patriarchal burden. He struggles to describe his relationship with Carla’s young son Vicente in a conservative culture that denigrates blended families even at the level of language. The Spanish word for “stepfather,” padrastro, carries a judgmental suffix that connotes anything from a minor annoyance (like a hangnail) to a deadbeat dad (73). Gonzalo’s anxieties about his poetic career and his paternal influence intersect in a pithy line that thankfully retains some of the original Spanish: “‘My padrastro is a poetastro,’” he bitterly imagines Vicente relaying (74). Gonzalo and Chilean Poet are at their best when they forget the allusions, endowing references with new meanings. In a moving scene, Gonzalo tells a grocery store clerk that he and Vicente are friends, realizing how the available Spanish words do not convey the depth of feeling between them. “The word stepfather and the word stepson are so ugly in Spanish–padrastro, hijastro–but we have to use them,” Gonzalo frets. Then, he finds a glimmer of hope: “We have to use them or maybe invent others” (66).
If only Gonzalo would take his own advice to depart from old sources. After attempting to pass off the poet Gonzalo Millán’s verses as his own, he leaves Carla (and the novel) as he pursues a doctorate in New York. As the grown-up Vicente and an American journalist named Pru become Chilean Poet’s protagonists, the novel pivots to highlight underread voices in Chilean verse while gesturing at the ways upper-class Chilean men retain control of a diversifying literary ecosystem. As Pru researches a story about (what else?) Chilean poets, she receives a preliminary interview list from Vicente’s pretentious friend Pato, an award-winning poet and graduate of Santiago’s most exclusive high school. Pato includes a single woman, lecturing Pru that “There aren’t many [women poets] and they aren’t very good, but it’s not their fault, it’s the fault of patriarchal capitalism” (225). Slyer still is the moment when Pru consults a literary critic named Gerardo Rocotto to learn more about the Santiago poetry scene. Rocotto has on hand “a list of around fifty poets…and indigenous and queer poets—a new canon, complimented by a bibliography of fifteen articles, all with the byline Gerardo M. Rocotto Contreras” (232). Chilean Poet suggests that there are poets getting published despite the persistence of “patriarchal capitalism,” but they cannot entirely operate outside its ideological grip.
At times, it’s puzzling why Pru assumes the narrative mantle of Chilean Poet after Gonzalo’s departure, given the compelling warmth of the earlier sections between poetastro and hijastro. Pru is likely meant as a mouthpiece for the identitarian critiques that the novel wants to make. Yet these sections do not always reach their subversive potential. For example, Pru’s plotline in which she, an attractive young woman, hangs out with a bunch of real and invented young writers is a pale imitation of the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño’s metafictions (a strange choice for Zambra, given that he has ducked comparisons to this particular countryman for his entire career).[1] Chilean Poet’s brief portraits of real and invented contemporary Chilean writers do not leave as lasting an impression as Bolaño’s biting allusions do. If Bolaño deployed the roman à clef genre to skewer his powerful contemporaries (see his shameless parody of Raúl Zurita’s sky writing in Distant Star), the allusions in this section of Chilean Poet solidify the center of the Chilean poetic canon instead of exploring its margins.
For example, when Pru and Rocotto journey to see the nonagenarian Nicanor Parra, Parra reminds Rocotto that he knows the critic has called his anti-poetry “obsolete.” Then he swiftly dispatches the man to buy lunch: Parra may be obsolete, but Rocotto must still pay his respects. It’s unclear if the impact of Parra’s anti-poetry needed defending, however, given the ubiquitous elegies written in the wake of his death in 2018. Moreover, Chilean Poet confirms Parra’s centrality while marginalizing his own sister, the folklorist, singer, ethnographer, and national icon Violeta Parra. The narrator depicts Nicanor showing Pru a photo of the siblings: “They look serious, and the poet, oddly, looks very old. Of course, he was around fifty years younger than he is now” (271). “The poet” alludes very clearly to Nicanor; the noun is gendered male in Poeta chileno lest there be any confusion.[2] But Violeta Parra was a prolific verse writer who is now understood as an important part of the Chilean midcentury literary tradition alongside the likes of Neruda, Lihn, Nicanor Parra, and the original Gonzalo Rojas.[3] Though this section of the book presumes to be a journey through the queer, Indigenous, and feminist segments of Chilean literary society, Chilean Poet often reveals its investment in maintaining the boundaries Pru supposedly investigates.
However, the novel is mostly uninterested in worshipping at the altar of literary idols (with the exception of Nicanor Parra). It gestures at a sea change within the Chilean literary establishment, even if it does not always carry its conclusions to the shore. Amid a contemporary leftist and feminist resurgence in Chile, Chilean Poet enters a conversation about poetry, feminism, and national identity that is still ongoing. After the widespread social protests in October 2019, Chilean feminists have reclaimed Nobel Laureate Gabriela Mistral from the desexed matronly image promoted by the Pinochet dictatorship, using her instead as a symbol for their battles against gender-based violence. “At a time of powerful feminist movements, a time when we are calling out violence against women, this is not a time for Neruda,” Chilean professor Claudia Cabello Hutt recently told the New York Times. “This is a time for Mistral.”[4] Mistral’s hour is at hand both in Chile and in Chilean Poet in more ways than one, given that her poetics are characterized by a reverence for quotidian relational gestures. The novel ends with a moving scene as Gonzalo and Vicente rekindle their relationship despite their history of intimacy and abandonment. Chilean Poet reminds us that change does not always occur in poetry salons, canons, or university classrooms, but also in everyday relationships—that it is possible for a former padrastro and hijastro to simply become fellow poets among a diversifying circle of writers.
[1] See Andrew Martin, “A More Personal Chile,” New York Review of Books, March 7, 2019, or Natasha Wimmer, “‘My Documents,’ by Alejandro Zambra,” The New York Times, March 27, 2015.
[2] Alejandro Zambra, Poeta chileno (Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2020), 327.
[3] “Violeta Parra, la poeta que eligió ‘quedarse con la gente,’” Sociedad de Escritores de Chile, April 22, 2017, https://www.sech.cl/violeta-parra-la-poeta-que-eligio-quedarse-con-la-gente.
[4] Ana Lankes, “Move Over, Pablo Neruda. Young Chileans Have a New Favorite Poet,” The New York Times, January 30, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/28/books/poetry-gabriela-mistral.html.