Aiming for compression, he stated that writing a whole book to develop an idea that could be conveyed orally in a few minutes was a waste of time. It was better to pretend the book already existed and to comment on it. Zambra´s novella feels like an outline or summary for a larger work. What it manages to condense are not ideas or plots, as in Borges, but an emotional atmosphere that is complex and nuanced yet sparsely delineated.

Bonsai and The Private Life of Trees have been published in the US in a collection on The Contemporary Art of the Novella (Melville House). Are you concerned with literary genres? Do you set out to write novellas or do you make no distinction between novellas and straight novels?

I am not concerned with literary genres (I have other concerns!), but I always aim at precision. I am more drawn toward pruning that adding. And I seek to specialize, as it were, the form of the novel. But novels don’t really have a form and that’s what I love about them. As a reader, I like the idea of novellas but, when it comes to my own books, I do not make a distinction between genres. I’d rather let them grow (or not) by themselves, without constraints.