Almost overnight, Alejandro Zambra has established himself as one of the leading emerging voices of Latin American fiction. His first novel, Bonsai (2006, published in English by Melville House), was acknowledged as a unique and resonant piece, a peak in the diverse and chaotic panorama of contemporary fiction written in Spanish. Zambra’s sparse, quiet, almost austere novella, in which not much seemed to happen by means of plot or action, set a distinctive tone. Ian McEwan once described himself as the kind of novelist who could never fully master the art of the novel. One can never become an expert in writing novels, he said, you only resolve the enigma of narrative fiction one novel at a time. There is another kind of writer (e.g. Haruki Murakami) who does not set out to write novels in the sense described by McEwen: writers who build their books within a larger literary project. Murakami does not sit down to write novels: he sits down to write Murakami novels. Alejandro Zambra belongs in this second category. He has found a personal, idiosyncratic take on fiction, confirmed by his second novella The Private Life of Trees (2007, Melville House).
     Alejandro Zambra was an acclaimed poet before making the leap into fiction. This accounts for his uncanny ability for condensation, his radical minimalism, the restraint alluded to in the title of Bonsai. In the mid 1930’s, Borges devised the trick of summarizing non-existent works.