When Small Looms Large: Alejandro Zambra's Bonsai

This is the first of at least two (maybe three) titles from Melville House make my list of the top 31 books of 2009.

Melville House deserves (and has received) a lot of credit for publishing not one, but two lines of novellas. There is the classically minded The Art Of The Novella and the contemporary issues under The Contemporary Art Of The Novella.

Today we're looking at a title from the latter.


Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra. Translated by Carolina De Robertis. Melville House. Trade Paperback. ISBN: 9781933633626. $13.

Let me start by saying that I work with bonsai nearly every day. My day job requires me to care for at any one point upwards of thirty bonsai trees. Additionally I have three of my own. A bay leaf tree (hey, what else would an Italian-American bonsai?), a golden gate ficus (that I cultivated over a decade ago) and a boxwood shrub I hauled out of the nursery a month or so ago.

Additionally I get to produce them from time to time at work. I have a great little banana tree I did (with beach-like sand soil cover) that can be yours for $59.99 and another boxwood that will cost you a mere $79.99.

Kidding aside, there is a reason why I am discussing the art of bonsai production. Two reasons in fact. One, because the title and at times subject of Zambra's gem of a book is, well, bonsai and secondly because the novella itself is a form that strives to do similar things as the purely aesthetic art of bonsai.

Living somewhere between the short story and the novel, the novella is usually defined as a prose fiction ranging from 30,000 to 50,000 words. There must be a unity of vision and technique to successfully keep it separate from the relatively fractile short story. It can afford to do this for only so long, as any more and it becomes a novel.

The novella had a rocky existence in the last decades of the 20th century. This was very much the case in the United States, where the idea of the Great-American-Novel requires six hundred pages and a complex layering of plots, people and a nostalgic Midwestern setting (okay, so the last part is meant to be humorous).

In any case, the slender novella was too diminutive for many writers’ egos. On a different and equally damaging tip, some respected American novelists (Philip Roth, Don Delillo) have used the form as an occasional cash cow. They have generated quick and often less than thought provoking fare set on either a campus or a limo ride or whatever. The setting doesn't really matter. The important thing is that their loyal fans purchase these books and the parade of baby boomer critics adore them for the slight nods made backwards into the supposed confusion of the 1960's.

While writers in other countries were producing novellas with purpose the US book market only purveyed them as "qucik" reads and half novels written by writers who are better suited at the distance run. The sport of the novella is one of sprinting and weightlifting. It is about packing a shit ton of power in a small space.

Shelving the rant, let me get back to what Melville House has done. In both series they have created a wonderful introduction for readers to explore this potent short form. Whether a classic like The Man Who Would Be King or a modern situated title like Bonsai, both achieve that all-important element of sublimity. Just as a bonsai tree is supposed to evoke the power and awe of a massive tree growing on a wind-scorched mountainside so too is the novella supposed to impress the import of a more full-sized book. Or more. Such power so briefly rendered is possibly more noticeable to the reader.

Bonsai by the Chilean writer, Alejandro Zambra, is a case of more. Weighing in at 83 sparsely printed pages, Bonsai is yet a complex and sophisticated story concerning subjects as expansive as love and art. In a few very simple words a handful of lives are given life. For such a small book to have fully developed characters is impressive and this, in the end, is what is essential to the novella. A good novella must impress you with its tiny size and the power of its language.

Okay. You get the point. Back to Bonsai.

The story is simple. Boy falls in love with girl and vice versa. They share dreams and aspirations and yet there is an ever-looming mortality to their love. The beauty of their young love is haunting to both them and the reader. They are budding aesthetes, readers and engaged in cultivating a idealized picture of themselves.

In time they part and yet neither, despite future amorous ventures, finds a love like the previous one. Because of their early conception of the beautiful this first love, which is nearly always the most beautiful of our lives, looms larger than they. They are stunted before it.

The boy dreams of becoming a writer and yet does not write very much. In a moment of weakness he begins to lie to people, explaining that he is editing a manuscript for a very respected writer. He is not. He wants to seem a success and so has conjured the lie from tenuous truths (he did interview for the job but was turned down on account of asking for too much money). In time he has to deepen the lie and in order to keep it going and remarkably he begins to actually write the chapters of this imaginary story he is editing, which in cruel irony concern bonsai. This is where the magic happens.

It is reversed however, the role of tree and bonsai. More accurately it is transformed and twisted into a postmodern situation. Instead of the small, highly cultivated tree borrowing the spirit of its fully grown natural cousins the young pair are left merely twisted and small before the vast power of their idealized love. Not to diminish them however, for while Zambra may make a stab at paralelling a tree's soul it is still humanity he is writing of. They are quietly and profoundly touching in their unraveling.