I really liked this self-conscious and very short novel from the writer the back cover at least reassures me is the best of the new Chilean writers. The basic idea is that the whole novel is centered around one night when a step-father puts his daughter to bed and reflects on why his wife is late... in the process he digs into the different possibilities for her lateness, the relationship history they share, his writing, and what might happen next. It's singularly focused but at the same moment aware to the multiple worlds that are called into being by the event of his wife's lateness. It's smart and insightful and a pretty fun read, though I wonder a little bit if I'll even remember it a week from now. I mean, maybe I wil, but I'm not sure.

It does put me in the mind of the similarly inventive comic series _Daytripper_, though that series has for itself a kind of visual distinctiveness that the sentences here lack an equivalent for, and _Daytripper_ also perversely benefits from how boring and conventional most American comics are.

It's hard to express just what this means about Zambra's book, just that I think he's one to watch and that I hope this is his weakest work and not his best.

eh

3,5

i wasn’t that charmed by this one! undeniably as the front blurb of my copy notes, zambra is a compelling storyteller “at the sentence level.”. but the larger piece? i’m not so sold on it. there are a lot of little gems in here but i was put off by the way that the story meandered. also with this, my 4th book of zambra’s, i’m getting tired of the “woe is me” male writer protagonists lol

Before I write a review, I try to tune into the echoes from the book that remain in my consciousness in order to pin down how it has made me feel and how the reading of it has intersected with my own life. Usually a lot of ideas occur to me fairly quickly and then the review is up and away.
I’ve been very patient since finishing The Private Life of Trees. I’ve tried listening for the echoes but they are very faint. In the end, all I’ve come up with is an odd feeling of discomfort, the kind of mild distress I might feel while observing someone undergoing an uncomfortable procedure like a full body wax or maybe a tattoo in a delicate place, the kind of unease that would make me think I shouldn’t be watching, that this should take place in private: Yes, I was embarrassed to have been a witness to the inner anguish experienced by Julian, the narrator during the night in which the action of this short novel takes place. I was uncomfortable in the face of his pathetic realisation, and almost from the beginning, that he has been abandoned once again by a lover. I was troubled by his victim status and his certainty that both he and his writing will be rejected in the future by his stepdaughter:
Literature does not interest Daniela. She reads a lot, but she only reads history books or memoirs or essays. The truth is she can’t stand fiction; she gets impatient with novelists’ absurd farces; let’s pretend there was once a world that was more or less like this, let’s pretend that I’m not me, that I’m a reliable voice, a white face over which less-white faces, semi-dark faces pass.
Alejandro Zambro underlines the victim theme early in the book. In one of the few references to the trees of the title, he writes:
Right now, sheltered by the solitude of the park, the trees are commenting on the bad luck of an oak - two people have carved their names, as a symbol of their friendship, into his bark. “No one has a right to give you a tattoo without your consent,” says the poplar.
So is that Zambra's main message here? That Julian is destined to have other couples’ vows carved into his psyche again and again? If so, I would prefer not to be a witness to his poignant reminiscences. I feel exactly the way Julian imagines his stepdaughter might have felt after listening to her real father's 'girlfriend' stories: The important thing would have been to have saved the breath he uses to tell them.

PS A week after writing this review, I'm still thinking about Zambra's book. Some of my further thoughts arose out of the comment section (see below) but it is the book I'm currently reading, an Irish one, that has underlined for me exactly what I missed in Zambra's writing: an understanding of the tradition out of which he writes, the literary influences he has undergone, the echoes, conscious or otherwise of all the Chilean/South American writers who have gone before him. I realised that I just don't know enough about what has made him the writer he has become in order to understand his approach to writing. There are many writers whom I've read and appreciated without knowing anything about their literary background; their books were all the support I required. In Zambra's case, I needed a crutch.