Alejandro Zambra: la lengua privada de un poeta chileno

Abstract

The amazement, comicality and complicity in the use of the Spanish language (particularly in its Chilean variant) are part of what might be called a Zambrian writing style: it is not unusual to find ironies, puns and semantic games in his narrative and essayistic texts, which humorously destabilize the idiomatic rules, while appealing to a local sense of community. This is particularly apparent in some essays of Tema Libre (2018) and in his latest novel, Poeta chileno (2020), whose main characters are a North American journalist determined to write a chronicle on contemporary Chilean poetry and two poets, a stepfather and his stepson. Their relationship unleashes a linguistic predicament, as they need other words than those offered by the dictionary to name it.