La vida privada de los árboles

Veronica is late, Veronica is inexplicably late, and the book goes on until she comes back or until Julián is sure she won't come back. That's what The Private Life of Trees is about: the long and perhaps definitive night that Julián spends waiting for his wife to come back, for the book to end. Towards the end of this, Alejandro Zambra's second novel, Julián wants to be a voiceover, a collector of other people's stories; he wants to write and not be written, but to wait is to allow himself to be written: to wait is to follow a constant drift of images. So the story begins long before that last night, maybe one afternoon in 1984, with the scene of a child watching television. And it ends with the inevitable conjectures about the life of Daniela, Veronica's daughter, at twenty, twenty-five, thirty years old, when it has been a long time since her stepfather told her stories about trees.