Chilean Literature Archives - A Geography of Reading

Imagine a woman, born in the US but who lived for a formative year in Pinochet’s Chile, reading a book by an author born in Chile and living in Canada. The book, originally written in French, is about a Chilean-Canadian man who has returned to his native country to bury his father. Perhaps this international hopscotch begins to describe the magic I felt when opening Eucalyptus by Mauricio Segura. I’m so far inside it, I can’t even tell. Let me share with you what I loved about this beautiful book.

Literary Language

Segura captured me with the first sentence of the first paragraph: “On the horizon, pools of water vaporized as he advanced.” Writers and writing teachers make a lot of (deserved) fuss about first sentences–so much so that it can be paralyzing for a writer to try and come up with something original but not forced, interesting but not obscure. With this sentence I had no idea what country the characters were in, who they were, or what they were doing except advancing. And I was happy to advance with them. It quickly becomes obvious that Alberto is driving and he’s doing so very determinedly.

“He only came to himself when the pickup crossed the old metal bridge over the Bío Bío, where there was a gaggle of children giddy with laughter bobbing along in the river’s treacherous current.” – Mauricio Segura

This is the first mention of geography and it felled me and grounded me. I remembered driving with my own family across that same river one night to see Halley’s Comet. I remembered the children playing in the river. But even if I didn’t have those memories, this simple sentence begins to open for the reader the world that Alberto is re-entering. The children are gleeful despite the danger. Reading further the parents are watching but not very closely. This is not a world where children live on leashes and Alberto will learn some lessons along the way.

My brother, one of the most faithful readers of this blog, will be interested to know that the story takes place in Temuco. It is on the sidewalks of that town that I remember him earning the nickname “Terremoto” which means earthquake. I’ll spare his dignity a little and not commit to the Internet the other story about him in Temuco. Just know, Tosh, that I haven’t forgotten and I’m using my rights as an older sister to tease you about it for life.

“Yes, it is now that the family is breaking up, decomposing like molecules being brought to the boil, and we are scattering to the four corners of the American continent.” – Mauricio Segura

And then there are the images. This is a simple one–much of the language in this book is simple–but it’s deceptive in its plainness. In one sentence we have a family that is rotting, separating, heating up, and dispersing. In a book of only 150 pages, each word has a lot of work to do and Segura (along with translator Donald Winkler) is doing it well.

Parallels

This is a book to read closely. The story of Alberto returning from Canada for his father’s funeral is closely woven into the story of Roberto (Alberto’s father) returning from Canada for his father’s funeral. You read that right. I wondered if Alberto’s son, Marco, would someday also return…

“‘A few weeks later,’ Carmen said, ‘a policeman came to the farm.’

Opening the door, Roberto saw a youth dressed in a khaki shirt and brown pants.” – Mauricio Segura

What’s especially interesting about this relationship between parallel time periods is that there are often no transitions between them. Carmen is telling the story to Alberto after the death of Roberto but the paragraphs of time just slip into each other. It makes the book a little difficult to follow at times but it also causes this gorgeous overlap where all events feel as though they are occurring in the present. It’s a difficult effect (between that and the bouncing bus, I did a fair amount of re-reading) and not one I’d use lightly but Segura pulls it off.

Foreign Roots

I was attracted to this book first because of the title. The smell of eucalyptus trees can still take me back to long walks up Caracol Hill where I picnicked with my family beneath those fragrant trees. That scent is such a strong part of my memory that when visiting San Francisco I make a beeline for Lafayette Park to be surrounded by it.

What surprised me about this book was finding out that eucalyptus trees are indigenous to Australia, not Chile, and were as much imports to that land as I was. I liked thinking about all the degrees of native heritage that the characters enjoyed from the very native Mapuche people to Marco, a child whose father and grandfather had both bounced back and forth across the continent.

Speaking of the continent, did you catch that moment in the second pull quote on this page where Segura wrote of the “American continent”? When I first learned about the continents as a student in Chile, I memorized the names of all six of them. Imagine my surprise and confusion when I came home to the US where I was then taught that there are seven continents. Amazing how a simple denotation on a map can change your worldview.

Rich Storylines

I’ve already discussed parts of Alberto and Roberto’s stories, but there is a lot more background packed into this book including allusions to the troubled political history of Chile, evolving relationships with indigenous peoples, and a volcano. On top of that are some deeply complicated family and neighborhood relationships. But somehow the book is not at all crowded. In fact, at times there was so much going on at an almost subliminal level that Segura left me questioning whether I had any talent as a writer at all because he was weaving those storytelling threads so well. The best books leave us something to aspire to.

If you want to explore a little piece of Chile, pick up a copy of Eucalyptus from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Storytelling from Afar

The first scene in the story is the most shocking but it remains distant. Bolaño hinted at menace behind Fred’s motives as he drove the girls around town and to his parents’ house and we see later that there was in fact danger, his parents were dead and not likely from natural causes. By throwing in phrases such as “According to what Anne told me,” the author separates the reader from the material just enough that it was difficult for me to engage with the characters. There is ample tragedy in this story as Anne flounders through relationships, prostitutes herself and disappears and her sister becomes a suicidal alcoholic, but Bolaño left me with the sense of resignation rather than desperation on the part of the characters, especially Anne. Because Anne wasn’t fighting for her own life and I didn’t know her, I wasn’t interested in fighting for her.

Bolaño writes about a similar sense of remove on Anne’s part as she overhears a conversation between Susan and Paul. “Anne remembers that there was something oddly artificial about this conversation between her lover and her sister, as if they were assessing the plot of a film, not something that had happened in real life.” As a reader, I also felt like I was watching someone assess a plot and part of it was how Bolaño’s narrator kept interrupting the story with “Anne remembers” and “says Anne.” Over and over again he pulled me out of the story and presented it to me as a tableau instead of letting me experience it.

Specific and Sexual Detail

Bolaño gives only the sparsest detail when he does go into scene, and those details are often carnal or hint at carnality. They start out as sexual: “a very bright red nightgown,” hotel walls “made of meat,” the red dress and shoes of Anne the prostitute, pornographic films where “men always ejaculated onto, rather than in, their partners,” and gradually become more medical but less descriptive: “doctors diagnosed a serious illness” and then her relapse. Bolaño wet my appetite for anything to happen with the rawness of some of the earlier descriptions and by playing down the seriousness of the illness, he left me wide open for Anne’s response to Bill’s suggestion that they have a child: “inside she could feel herself starting to scream, or rather, she could feel, and see, the dividing line between not screaming and screaming. It was like opening your eyes in a cave bigger than the Earth” the very next phrase is again the distancing “Anne remembers.”

The distance is clearly intentional on Bolaño’s part. In “Mauricio (‘The Eye’) Silva,” Bolaño again summarizes nearly the entire story. However, as a reader, I felt engaged with The Eye. I wanted to know more about him, and I cared what happened to him. Perhaps it is because The Eye is introduced more sympathetically: he “always tried to avoid violence” or because the author states “The case of The Eye is paradigmatic and exemplary.” In either case, Bolaño allowed me to relate to The Eye in a way I could not with Anne.

Is it because Anne is North American and The Eye Chilean? I don’t know why Bolaño put Anne at such a distance from the reader, but she does come off as an oddity, someone belonging in a jar on a shelf.

Writing in Summary

Summary is a tricky business. Beginning writers are often advised to dramatize, dramatize, dramatize, but there is a place for summary in writing. It is the place of transitions, of time passing, of the narrator. Bolaño’s lack of scene makes his stories feel more like a story told in a bar or beside a fire and it makes the reader more intimate with the narrator that with the protagonists. I love to write in summary, but this collection of stories made me more cautious because my own writing isn’t as “let me tell you a story” as Bolaño’s and in comparison I could come off as didactic. However, that chum in a bar style did open my eyes to a new way of writing summary where the interaction between reader and narrator is almost as intimate as the reader interpreting a scene. I would like to cultivate some of that intimacy.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Last Evenings on Earth from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.