The nostalgia of lost childhood; an interview with Alejandro Sabra in Kathimerini.

To mark the publication of Alejandro Sabra’s book *Ways of Returning Home*, Marialena Spyropoulou spoke with the Chilean author in a very interesting interview for the newspaper Kathimerini, which was published on 18 June in the Arts and Letters supplement. “I got lost once, I must have been five or six years old,” writes the Chilean writer, poet and literary theorist Alejandro Zambra in his autobiographical novel Ways of Returning Home, published in Greek by Ikaros Publications, translated by Achilleas Kyriakidis. Zambra, who is known in Greek literary circles from his first book, *Bonsai*, manages with this moving, direct, first-person novel to draw the reader into two narrative levels: the first describes the protagonist’s struggle to take centre stage in his own life; the second subtly underscores the sorrow a person feels when they realise they cannot return to what has ultimately been lost forever. – In your latest book, an earthquake – both real and symbolic – shakes the protagonist’s memory. What are the internal and emotional ‘earthquakes’ an adult needs in order to ‘return home’?– We grew up with the idea of an earthquake. My grandmother used to tell us bedtime stories about the people who died in the great earthquake of 1939. When it happened again in 1985, I thought, ‘So this is what an earthquake is like’. I feel that earthquakes shape your sensibility in many ways. You come face to face with the feeling that everything can be destroyed in an instant; that changes your life. And it gives you a sense of fragility. Since then, I can’t imagine the world as indestructible. – What was your childhood like? Is the book autobiographical? – I think all books are autobiographical, in one way or another. But it doesn’t really matter whether these things happened to me, after all. Ways of Returning Home is the first novel I wrote in the first person. I felt the need to discover exactly what this ‘I’ is, what it’s all about, but ultimately it’s more of a ‘we’ than an ‘I’. I belong to a generation that grew up trying to understand the difference between living in silence and having silence imposed upon them. I’m not claiming that this novel represents the entire generation—I would never say that—yet one of the most important issues the book grapples with is the legitimacy of memory. Whom do you represent when you try to create your own version of the past? In whose name do you speak, even when you speak only for yourself? I’m not sure if I had a happy childhood, but I certainly wasn’t unhappy. And I was growing up during the most dreadful years of our national history. Whilst I was more or less free, hundreds of my compatriots were being murdered and tortured, and Chile was surrendered to the most savage form of capitalism. This realisation, which came during my adolescence, reshaped my memories. In other words, suddenly all my memories turned bitter. And the very act of remembering became bitter. The intensity of poetry – You are also a poet and a professor. Your grandmother used to ‘whittle out’ little verses. Yet you have written that you feel uncomfortable with your poetic nature.– I have loved words since I was a small child. I loved storytelling too, but I think I gradually discovered stories I wanted to tell. I’m not the ‘let me tell you a story’ type. Besides, I don’t believe in themes. In that sense, I proceeded as a poet. On the other hand, I’m not sure whether there are boundaries between prose and poetry, or what they might be. – Why do you consider poetry more important than fiction?– That’s purely a matter of intensity. Poetry appealed to me more as a reader, of course. And when I was twenty, writing novels seemed boring... spending hours in front of the computer...– You once said that you’re always looking for that moment when you’re not sure about what you’re doing... – I firmly believe in that. I don’t treat writing as a matter of me saying something the other person already knows. When you write, you might have a few ideas, but as the writing progresses, you lose control. I like the moment when I catch myself not knowing what I’m doing, but on the other hand I know that I’m doing something. I start with an image and try to develop it like a small sculpture. There’s already something there, and you work on it until you discover it. – Do you find it difficult to write or finish a book? You’ve said that books are born as soon as they’ve moved beyond you. – I wouldn’t call it just difficulty. There are, of course, many pleasant, good moments as well. Even when you’re writing about painful things, you experience a sense of fulfilment, or the illusion of it. It isn’t always consciously pleasant. It’s hard for me to accept that a book is finished. My Spanish publisher, Jorge Herralde, teases me because I’m very good at making last-minute changes. But as soon as the book is published, I forget about it and move on. Pinochet’s Chile – You grew up during the Chilean dictatorship. You describe the feeling of playing a secondary role on the stage of your own life. What is your life like today? – It took us a long time to feel like protagonists in our own lives. We grew up with parents who claimed the experience and legitimacy of History entirely for themselves. That is difficult to deal with. But now we are the parents. And I’m interested in the transition. That is precisely what the novel *The Private Lives of Trees* and the poetry collection *Facsimile/Multiple Choice* deal with. I insist on the shift, on the transition from the singular to the plural. Everything there is caught up in this oscillation. – You write about memory. The memory of your generation. What is the specific psychological and political context of this generation? – These are the questions I ask myself, and I can only answer them by writing a novel! I consider Ways of Returning Home to be a novel about dealing with the past, in various ways. It is not just a matter of ‘killing the father’. It’s mainly about the fact that you’re no longer 20 years old and you ‘killed’ your father many years ago, and you discover that you want to bring him back to life, and that’s not possible. You want to go home and you don’t know where home is.– Every novel is a letter to the world. What sort of letter did you send? – I have no idea... The idea of being translated is something that fascinates me. I do feel, however, that I sent a letter. Writing is the ability to share and to lose. I love Emily Dickinson’s poem: ‘This is my letter to the world, which never wrote to me...’ but ultimately I can’t help but see how lucky I am. I’m in touch with so many people, and I read everything my readers write to me and feel devoted to them all. A lover of the work of Greek poets – we Greeks share a past with Chile when it comes to poetry. We too had a dictatorship, albeit on a different scale, but we have faced and continue to face problems with transitions. As I was reading your novel, I had a subtle sense of a shared psychological atmosphere that pervades the families, as well as the issue of the earthquake. Is this something you have considered? – I am a devotee of ancient Greek prose and I am very fond of modern Greek poetry, with which I am well acquainted. I studied under Miguel Castillo Didier, a great teacher, who is arguably the greatest translator of Cavafy. He has also translated Seferis, Ritsos, Elytis and Kazantzakis. I know these works in Spanish translation inside out and I adore them. Cavafy’s ‘God Has Forsaken Antony’ is one of my favourite poems. When I was 21, I wrote my own version of this poem for a tribute to Cavafy. Castillo Didier asked young poets to contribute, so I wrote something for him and he translated it himself. I don’t know what became of that poem, but now that I think about it, the first language into which any of my work was ever translated is Greek. I’m not comparing the two national histories, although I do believe, unfortunately, that we have things in common because of the political violence we have experienced.