Description

Bonsai is the story of Julio and Emilia, two young Chilean students who, seeking truth in great literature, find each other instead. Like all young couples, they lie to each other, revise themselves, and try new identities on for size, observing and analyzing their love story as if it’s one of the great novels they both pretend to have read. As they shadow each other throughout their young adulthoods, falling together and drifting apart, Zambra spins a formally innovative, metafictional tale that brilliantly explores the relationship among love, art, and memory.

Publisher Review

'The "last truly great book" I read has to be Alejandro Zambra's Bonsai. A subtle, eerie, ultimately wrenching account of failed young love in Chile among the kind of smartypant set who pillow-talk about the importance of Proust.... A total knockout.' - Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 'Every beat and pattern of being alive becomes revelatory and bright when narrated by Alejandro Zambra. He is a modern wonder.' - Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch 'Rather than shrink in its conversion to bound covers, as most manuscripts do, Zambra's text has swelled-and its effect on the world of Chilean literature has been entirely disproportionate to its size.' - Marcela Valdes, The Nation 'The most talked-about writer to come out of Chile since Bolano.' - New York Times 'Strikingly original.' - James Wood, New Yorker 'There's a dreamy associative quality of the novella that made it feel true and beautiful and moving. I left Bonsai feeling a little melancholic ache in my ribs, as though some crucial part of me had been taken away.' - New York Times 'Bonsai fulfills one of the requirements of the short novel: the search for perfection [...] supremely, effectively ambiguous.' - J.A. Masoliver Rodenas, La Vanguardia 'When I read Zambra I feel like someone's shooting fireworks inside my head.' - Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive 'Not a single word is wasted in this powerful, elegantly told story, which traces through a few episodes in the lives of Julio and Emilia, two young people who fall for one another at university-bonding over their love of literature and discussion-then retreat from one another's lives.' - Literary Hub