Here’s Emilia trying to pin down the exact word for her desire for Julio: “This is the problem with young Chileans. However, Zambra turns sentiment and nostalgia into occasions for humor, vulnerability and truth by deploying a frank specificity. Sentimentality often makes for compelling if empty reading because, when wielded irresponsibly, it can cheapen a story to the point of imitation.
There is something inherently poignant in the idea of a first, doomed love that can never be recaptured. This sequence of events might suggest the kind of love story that writers such as Sarah Dessen and Nicholas Sparks have turned into literary and cinematic empires. Translated by Megan McDowell.Īlejandro Zambra’s “Bonsai” (translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell) begins with an ending: “In the end she dies and he is alone, although really he had been alone for some years before her death.” What follows is a truly sublime novella as we watch Julio (the aforementioned “he”) and Emilia (the aforementioned “her”) encounter each other, fall in love, then fall out of touch, until Julio discovers in the novella’s last, beautiful pages that Emilia is dead.
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