Intrigued, the young boy does as she asks. Finally, they speak, and Claudia eventually asks him to spy on Raúl, who, she says, is her uncle. He is shocked when over the ensuing days he finds this girl, Claudia, following him around. His neighbor, Raúl, who has always been single, is with two people the young boy has never seen, a woman and a young girl, maybe a few years older than he. It’s about one of those children growing up and becoming a writer, and wondering just what he has to write about.īack to that first story: the young protagonist and his family gather with the neighborhood after the 1984 earthquake. This novel is, in part, a rumination on those children who were relatively well off, who grew up hearing stories of kidnappings and torture but who never knew anyone who suffered in such a way. In contrast, the characters in Ways of Going Home, though living directly under the thumb of Pinochet, don’t have any of those kinds of encounters. Much of Roberto Bolaño’s fiction deals with Pinochet’s time in power indeed, Bolaño had personal confrontation with the regime: after the coup he was arrested on suspicion of being a terrorist and was in custody for eight days, only to be rescued by prison guards who happened to be former classmates (see his story “Dance Card” for a fictional account). It should be noted that doubts have arisen as to whether this ever happened at all nevertheless, Bolaño’s fiction gets up close and personal with the Pinochet regime. Augusto Pinochet had been in power for over ten years, since the coup d’état on September 11, 1973, and he would continue to be the dictator for six more. The protagonist, unnamed, is nine years old (as was Zambra at that time).

The first begins with an earthquake in 1984.

Ways of Going Home tells two stories in four fleeting chapters.

Ways of Going Home by Alejandro Zambra