Alejandro Zambra

GRANTA 113: THE BEST OF YOUNG SPANISH-LANGUAGE NOVELISTS

You catch a lot of hell whenever you are put on a list proclaiming you the best of anything. Suddenly you go from aspiring to reviled, from emerging to establishment. In terms of dealing with both the honor and the blow back, it helps if you are both optimistic and thick-skinned. And it certainly helps if someone’s got your back.

Not that Alejandro Zambra needs me, but this is where I come in. There are many places where his and my life merge. We both come from seismically challenged (earthquake-prone) places that still bear the scars of years of dictatorship. We both were published by university presses early in our careers. And we initially published and might continue to publish stories about a place for which we have great affection, but where we no longer live. I envy Alejandro the obvious sophistication and exquisite beauty of the pages you are about to read, a work which is filled with the heartfelt vulnerability of testimony. I loved it and I read it with the great joy of anticipation that one has reading a writer one hopes to read more and more of in the future.

I would now like to share with him a piece of advice I was given when I was chosen as one of Granta’s best young American novelists: go out and celebrate. Have a glass of champagne, or two or three. Don’t get a big head (though a hangover is OK) and get back to work. – Edwidge Danticat, Best Young American Novelist 2007

Each of the Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists answered a questionnaire on their influences and the role of the writer in public life. Here are Zambra’s answers:

Name the five writers you most admire at the moment (any period, language or genre).

Natalia Ginzburg, Marcel Proust, Jorge Luis Borges, Georges Perec, Nicanor Parra.

Have you published literary criticism?

Yes. I wrote weekly criticism for the Chilean press between 2002 and 2005.

Which languages do you read in?

Spanish and English.

Do you have your own web page?

No.

Is your fiction your sole source of income? If not, what else do you live off?

I’m a literature professor at the Universidad Diego Portales in my home country. And I also write regularly about literature in the press.

Should writers play a role in public life beyond the publication of their work? If so, in what way?

I think that publishing one’s work is the way to exert influence. I don’t know in what exactly. In a slow, flickering way, perhaps. I believe in the kind of long, silent communication that literature allows.