This short novel has been much praised, and as such this reader came to it with high expectations. Zambra’s book is so slight it’s almost, but not quite, transparent. Set over a night when the protagonist’s partner fails to return home, it adopts a structure which allows it to drift and muse, shifting the point of view to that of the protagonist’s young stepdaughter, imagining her take on these events years down the line. In some ways the novel seems in keeping with the likes of Chejfec, a nouveau roman, albeit one with a soft, tragic centre. It would clearly appear to be riffing off the fate of the disappeared, a Latin American phenomenon, one of the many crimes of the dictatorships. (Although one notes with a shiver the way far-right Anglo-Saxon groups in their vile T-shirts have adopted Pinochet.) Yet the allusion to the disappeared is so understated that one wonders if readers from other parts of the world would even pick up on it. Intriguingly I read an interview with another Chilean novelist, Labatut, saying he resented being compared to most of his contemporaries, and I found myself wondering if Zambra would be one of those. Perhaps The Secret Life of Trees is indeed a work of minor genius, in which case something was going over my head as I read it; in other ways it feels too slight and wispy to even stand on its own two feet: a gust of wind would be all that it takes to blow it over.
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