When she returns, the novel ends. But as long as she is gone, the book continues.
The 2007 novel by Chilean writer Alejandra Zambra The private life of trees was translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell as The private life of trees and first published in 2010 and again in 2023 by Fitzacarraldo Editions.
In a novella of no more than 100 pages and no longer than one night, Zambra tells the story of Julián, a writer and teacher who tries to put his eight-year-old stepdaughter Daniela to bed while her mother has not yet returned from her art class. As night falls, Juliàn is convinced that his wife Verónica will never come home. Whatever the reason, he and Daniela, stuck in their three-room apartment, must pass the early hours until she returns.
A long night
He begins the evening by telling Daniela a story, “The Private Life of Trees,” in which a bonsai poplar and a baobab have a conversation. The plot is no coincidence – Julián writes a novel of over 300 pages about a man who spends his days caring for his bonsai plants, which sounds very similar to Zambra’s debut novel. bonsai (1997). He writes on Sundays and through brutal editing the novel was shortened to less than 50 pages. He is often distracted and never really thought about turning his novel into a book.
When Daniela finally falls asleep, his thoughts wander to the beginnings of his relationship with Verónica and the great lengths he went to to win her affection, to his ex-girlfriend Karla, who kicked him out of the house with an unmistakable message painted on the wall: “Get out of my house, you wanker,” and to the family he avoided despite no reasonable conflict. He agrees that he was an “asshole,” a “bum,” but never a wanker. With his suitcase and his bonsai tree for company, he wanted to start over with Verónica, but as the night of uncertainty lengthens, so does the shadow of doubt he cast over her – was she just busy “shagging” her art teacher, in which case it would be better if she were dead, or had the tire simply burst?
With no one but Daniela for company, Julián wonders what his relationship with her is like – that of a stepfather who hardly figures in a person’s childhood memories and dreams of the future. This strangeness is compounded by the fact that he is a teacher and a writer, and cannot do either with full conviction. He teaches Italian poetry at a college in Santiago, but cannot read a word of the language. But Chile is a country of contradictions – the personal trainers are overweight, the dentists cannot pull teeth, and the yoga teachers are prescribed antidepressants. He remembers his mother, who “transformed” left-wing songs into right-wing songs. That is the style of the country.
A longer life
At some point during the night, he considers leaving his novel to Daniela. “The future is Daniela’s story,” and he imagines Daniela reading the story when she is thirty, and then again when she is thirty-five. She has a boyfriend, Ernesto, and has never really been interested in literature, although she reads a lot. Julián reflects on the burden of fatherhood and all the events in his life that have led him to this moment. If Verónica were to return, would there be another night when he could be alone with his stepdaughter, and would the novel he has written change the child’s life? His double existential crisis as father and writer weighs heavily on him on this night of unplanned loneliness.
As far as Julián has experienced, every relationship is fleeting. Even that between mother and child. Verónica was nowhere to be seen, Karla’s mother reappeared in her life after many years, while Julián had not bothered to keep in touch with his own. Marriages and remarriages are fickle – the only proof of the connection is the child who inadvertently becomes part of the games that adults play. Julián ponders his place in Daniela’s life – he can either raise her as his own child or leave her to fend for herself. He must decide what to do in the short time before her mother returns.
The private life of trees is just as much Julián’s aim, someonehappily married to Verónica, and his hope that Daniela will accept him as her father, because it is about the fragments of every person that make up a family. As in his latest novel Chilean poetHere, too, Zambra’s focus is on the father-child relationship and the forms it can take when not exposed to the watchful eye of the mother.
Zambra and Julián’s metafiction allows them to freely imagine what Daniela’s future might be like if tragedy struck her life in the present. The roles of author and narrator blur and self-deprecating jokes seem funnier. Since several of Zambra’s novels merge in this book, the reader also does the author a favor by letting him tell a great story that will cease to exist when the first rays of morning sun – or of reality – strike.
The private life of treesAlejandro Zambra, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, Fitzcarraldo Editions.
