A review by emsemsems
Not to Read by Alejandro Zambra

5.0

‘Madame Bovary sounded like porn; everything French sounded like porn to me. In that regard the movie was disappointing, but I watched it twice—I never again trusted movie versions, and ever since then I have thought that the cinema lies and literature doesn’t (I have no way of demonstrating this, of course). I read Flaubert’s novel much later—I tend to reread it every year, more or less when the first flu hits. There’s no mystery in changing tastes; these things happen in the life of any reader.’

No doubt that I will read this again at some point. This is really, really fucking fantastic. But bear in mind that I also really, really fucking love Latin American literature (also, I never really understood why I have always unashamedly preferred them to French literature (even the ones that I consider as my favourite 'French' authors/writers are Algerians), and Zambra basically wrote my feelings out so accurately in (various points of) the book). Also I love how Zambra thinks that ‘he doesn’t even drink (yerba) mate’ is a proper ‘insult’. Made me laugh. And on top of all its brilliance, the entire book is well seasoned with ‘dark humour’, which I obviously (always) enjoy very much as well. Full RTC later.

Some chunks of excerpts from the book that I really, really enjoyed reading below:

‘Extremely intelligent children, I tell myself with certain indulgence, don’t read the books that adults make them read: they don’t want to be extremely intelligent, since wanting to be intelligent is extremely unintelligent. Intelligent children dominate to perfection the art of playing dumb, and thus they reach adulthood absolutely unscathed, perfectly free of the harsh punishments that intelligence tends to bring.’

‘My generation grew up believing that Chilean literature was brown, and that there was no such thing as Latin American literature. When, at the beginning of the nineties, we started seeing literature of exile and Latin American books and books by gringos and Europeans and Japanese, we read our own writers as if they were foreign and the foreigners as if they were our own. Yukio Mishima was our Severo Sarduy. César Vallejo was our Paul Celan. Macedonio Fernández was our Laurence Sterne. Raymond Carver was our Raymond Chandler. Álvaro Mutis was our grandpa. Robert Creeley was our mute friend. Marguerite Duras was our Delmira Agustini and Delmira Agustini our Edgar Allan Poe. Emily Dickinson was our first love. And Borges was our Borges—It’s no joke: a lot of Chilean writers thought it was a tragedy that Bolaño was Chilean. Maybe it bothered them that he didn’t renounce his nationality. I’m not exaggerating if I say that most Chileans don’t want to read Chileans, much less Latin Americans.’

‘Some years ago I wrote a pretty unfavourable review about Carla Guelfenbein’s first book, and in light of the current commentary about El Resto es Silencio [The Rest is Silence], her most recent novel, I was wrong back then. It’s too late to find out, I have to say, since no one is going to deprive me of the pleasure it gives me not to read certain books, and the truth is I wouldn’t read another novel by Carla Guelfenbein even if Coetzee himself recommended it to me.’

‘There are many Bolaño stories I like, and it would be hard for me to choose just one, but there’s no doubt when it comes to choosing the one I like the least. When I read ‘Buba’ the first time, I thought it was clear that Bolaño was not a football fan, and that impression stayed with me until I reread it an hour ago and discovered there was nothing in the story that would allow the inference that Bolaño was uninterested in football. The problem was, rather, that we his readers are too interested in the sport.

The problem with ‘Buba’ is a problem with reality: we find it ultimately unrealistic that a Chilean could ever have a record like that of Acevedo, who has gone to several consecutive World Cups. It’s painful to accept, but the truth is that if Acevedo were Argentine or Uruguayan, the story would seem irreproachable to us. Bolaño knew this and laughs affectionately at us as he bestows on us great, imaginary triumphs. We have one consolation, minor but perhaps useful in facing the game this afternoon: we wouldn’t believe the story, either, if Acevedo were Peruvian.’