Bonsái

Condemned to seriousness and imposture, Julio, the silent protagonist of this book, ends up convincing himself that it is better to lock himself in his room to observe the growth of a bonsai tree than to wander the uncomfortable paths of literature. This is, as the narrator says, "a light story that gets heavy", an elliptical and vertiginous story marked by the disturbing disappearance of a woman. Jorge Luis Borges advised writing as if the summary of a work already written was being written. And that is precisely what Alejandro Zambra has done in this book which -in the same way that a bonsai is not a tree- more than a short novel or a long story, it is a novel-summary or, precisely, a novel-bonsai.