Ways of Going Home: A Novel

About this book

Alejandro Zambras Ways of Going Home begins with an earthquake seen through the eyes of an unnamed nine-year-old boy who lives in an undistinguished middleclass housing development in a suburb of Santiago Chile. When the neighbors camp out overnight the protagonist gets his first glimpse of Claudia an older girl who asks him to spy on her uncle Ral. In the second section the protagonist is the writer of the story begun in the first section. His father is a man of few words who claims to be apolitical but who quietly sympathizedto what degree the author isnt surewith the Pinochet regime. His reflections on the progress of the novel and on his own lifewhich is strikingly similar to the life of his novels protagonistexpose the raw suture of fiction and reality. Ways of Going Home switches between author and character past and present reflecting with melancholy and rage on the history of a nation and on a generation born too latethe generation which as the author-narrator puts it learned to read and write while their parents became accomplices or victims. It is the most personal novel to date from Zambra the most important Chilean author since Roberto Bolao.