Our Documents: Alejandro Zambra’s My Documents (Trans. Megan McDowell; McSweeny’s 2015)

My Documents starts with a narrator’s memory of the first computer he ever saw. Right away, he questions his own remembrance—it was 1980, maybe, when he was either four or five, and he’s not sure if the computer he recalls is a specific one or just a composite of those he saw taking trips to his father’s office. This is a fitting beginning to the Chilean author’s first collection of short stories (three previous novels have been translated into English); despite the techno-centric title, this is a book that’s more interested in why we write than how we manage to do so. Zambra is too self-aware to let the reader forget about process (references to computers, memory, and the act of writing are littered throughout the collection), but it’s not simply a gimmick.

My Documents interrogates creation in order to remind us of that most basic truth—that art exists to make sense of ourselves, others, and the world we live in.

At his best, Zambra’s great strength is in preventing his obsessions from overwhelming a story, instead allowing them a prominent place in the background from which they can add depth to the proceedings. The collection’s standout piece, “Camilo,” features all of Zambra’s calling cards. Although the story—which chronicles the protagonist’s relationship with his father’s godson, Camilo, a boy who becomes an extension of the family after his own father is exiled—is at heart the story of life under dictatorship, Zambra is less interested in making a political statement than crafting a complex portrait of friendship and fatherhood. We watch the narrator and Camilo do the things so many boys do: steal records, talk about girls, cause trouble in public. We see the narrator’s admiration of his father reflected in his love for soccer, a sport the elder once excelled at. We see Camilo seek to close his own gaping fatherlessness by attempting to connect with his surrogate family in the same way, by protesting the government in hopes his father will be allowed to return, by eagerly anticipating a doomed trip to see him.

Here, the personal and the political are irrevocably intertwined (some might say this is always true; I’ll leave that argument to others). Camilo is defined by his father’s absence, but he is also defined as much or more so by his kindness towards the younger narrator, his failed suaveness with women, his apathy towards soccer teams but support for the referee. This is how Zambra’s great strength works: what may be background for one reader can be foregrounded for another, allowing for a multitude of interpretations and emotional effects.

“Camilo” serves as an excellent case study because all of Zambra’s themes are present. We get the fallibility of memory (“I want to be clear here, and I’m getting mixed up”), technology (a stolen Talking Heads record shortly becomes a Los Prisioneros cassette), the impact of growing up in a dictatorship. But none of these intellectual curiosities overshadow the heart beating beneath “Camilo.” When, upwards of twenty years after the earlier events of the story, the narrator ends up watching a soccer match with Camilo’s father and refuses to use the informal tú with him, the moment resonates first and foremost because of the deep emotional significance the younger Camilo holds for the protagonist, a power that is only magnified by the masterful context Zambra uses to build the scene.

Much of what I said about “Camilo” can be applied to the other exceptional stories in My Documents: “Long Distance,” “National Institute,” “The Most Chilean Man in the World,” “Family Life.” In the worlds that Zambra creates, the Talking Heads or Messi are cultural touchstones on the same scale as Pinochet, and memory is eternally imperfect. It seems there’s something he’s trying to say in this, that a first computer can be as memorable as a first kiss, that we define ourselves as much by our loyalty to teams as we...