Chilean poet, Alejandro Zambra

For much of this novel, Gonzalo is a mediocre poet who wants to be a poet and a stepfather who acts as if he were the biological father of Vicente, a child addicted to cat food who, years later, refuses to study at university because his main dream is to also become a poet, despite the advice of Carla, his proudly solitary mother, and León, a mediocre father dedicated to collecting toy cars.

The powerful myth of Chilean poetry—a secondary character says, alluding to the verdicts of the Swedish Academy, that Chileans are two-time world champions of poetry—is revisited and questioned by Pru, an American journalist who becomes an accidental witness to that elusive and intense world of literary heroes and imposters.

“True seriousness is comic,” Nicanor Parra used to say, and this novel about poets who despise novels brilliantly proves it.

The current masculine labyrinth, the tragic ups and downs of love, fleeting families—or pseudo-families—the omnipresent distrust of institutions and authorities, the brave and stubborn desire to belong to a partly imaginary community, the meaning of writing and reading in a hostile world that seems to be crumbling at high speed… Many are the themes that this beautiful, powerful, and uninhibited book puts on the table. Author of works that have become emblematic, such as Bonsái, Formas de volver a casa (Ways of Going Home), Mis documentos (My Documents), or Facsímil (Facsimile), Alejandro Zambra makes a grand return to the novel with this book that confirms him as one of the fundamental voices of Latin American literature so far this century.