The Private Life of Trees by Alejandro Zambra review: the writer who never grew up

The wife is late and the husband is spiraling. This is the basic premise of Alejandro Zambra’s brief slip of a book The Private Lives of Trees. Julián, a writer, is waiting at home with his stepdaughter, but his wife Verónica is mysteriously not home at the expected time. Is she dead? Is she having an affair? Maybe she got a flat tire, or some other interruption that lies somewhere on the spectrum from inconvenience to emergency all the way up to tragedy. He imagines her dead, he imagines her in another’s arms. He doesn’t seem sure which would be worse.

As the night creeps on, Julián’s mind wanders. In his reverie, fiction blends with autobiography and he confuses the line between the book he is writing and the life he has led. He revisits the series of decisions that led to his ending up in a family with Verónica and her daughter Daniela, past romantic disasters and creative missteps; he speculates on what the future might look like, including one where his wife never returns.

He also wonders about Daniela, this strange little child living in his house. Daniela is both his and not his, both stranger and family. He keeps ruminating on a story he wrote about a bonsai tree, related to his own failed attempt at keeping one alive, and now he wonders, if his wife is dead and his stepdaughter is his responsibility, how will that turn out? He has been making up bedtime stories for Daniela about trees, the source of the book’s title, and he wonders whether once she is grown she will still like his writing. That’s a pretty selfish turn, from “Who will my daughter be?” to “Will she read my books?”, but everyone who knows writers will know it is accurate.

Now 47, Zambra was quite the hot thing for a bit, making it onto various lists of young and promising writers, and having his short fiction published at all the most respectable and predictable literary venues. But there is also the sense that the Chilean author only had one or two things really going on – sad literary boys, South American literature that doesn’t make us think too much about dictatorships and atrocity – and he’s been repeating them through many books, stories, and poems.

He was hot enough that the overlooked backlist is now being brought to the UK audience, via his regular translator Megan McDowell. But, since The Private Life of Trees made its first appearance in Spanish in 2007, literary trends have changed. The once-innovative devices of Zambra and his early autofiction cohort now read as cliché, from the self-involved internal monologue of the creative class to the listing of the books and films our writerly protagonist reads and admires.

There are clever self-references dangled in front of the devoted reader, like the fact that the book Julián is writing sounds a lot like Zambra’s own debut, 2006’s Bonsai. These kinds of things once felt exciting, but now they’re like cheap tricks.

Which is also true of much of the prose. The internal monologue swings through philosophical and mundane, but the highs only go so high. “Instead of loving Karla,” Julián tells us as he considers the break-up that preceded his relationship with Verónica, “he had loved the possibility of love, and then love’s imminence.” Okay. There’s also a lot of horny panting after Verónica tarted up to seem poetic, in the sort of effortful prose that hopes to be described as transcendent in the newspaper or upvoted on Goodreads.

It’s a young work with all the typical flaws of such, but it’s also by a writer who never quite matured. His narrator shares his problem – “There was nothing in Julián’s past from which to flee, but that was exactly what he was escaping: mediocrity.” Zambra has perhaps provided us with the most apt and most unfortunate symbol for his own book, the drying-out bonsai tree: unnaturally stunted, fussy and fruitless.

The Private Life of Trees is published by Fitzcarraldo at £10.99. To order your copy call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books