‘Life is a huge album for creating an instantaneous past with loud and definite colors’

Our lives are full of faces that come and go, some disappearing forever from our private stage, while others sometimes check back in and out over time. Each of these faces leaves a mark on us through our collisions of selves, sometimes leaving unconscious marks that can be good or bad, and some leaving scars that we carry forever. Alejandro Zambra’s breathtaking novella, The Private Lives of Trees, examines these faces that come and go and pays particular attention to the importance of a father and mother, as well as the role a stepfather must fill in a young girl’s life. Zambra delivers a succinct message that, despite the mere 98pgs of sparse prose, manages to fill the readers heart to the point of overflowing. The Private Lives of Trees is a brief, minor chord that resonates deep into the soul, examining the individual notes of a life, as well as the individual lives, that resonate together to deliver the chord’s full impact.

Fatherhood is a difficult, yet rewarding role. It is both ‘a problem and a privilege,’ where the performance will leave residue upon the lives of those in the fathers care. Julián, a young professor of literature, is a recent addition to the lives of Verónica and her 8 year old daughter Daniela. Through one long night where Verónica has not returned from her art class, Julián examines the fragments of his life leading him to this night, as well as speculates on what the future may hold. Through these fragments, we see an average young male still struggling to form his own identity. There are flashes where the reader can feel Julián as an actual person, however, he is mostly comprised of reactions to others instead of being his own driving force in the world. Each night, he tells Daniela an ongoing story about trees while working on his own novel, and he must inevitably question himself if being just a literary image is enough of a presence in the girl’s life. ‘He wanted—wants—to be a writer, but being a writer is not exactly being someone.’ If Verónica never returns, is he fit to remain in the daughters life? Is his slim novella enough to leave a lasting impression on her if she ever reads it as an adult?

Throughout the novella are references to people or things being not as they seem. There is the mother who ‘sang songs that were not hers to sing…she sang songs of the left as if they were songs of the right,’, politicians who are ‘of the right, who seemed more like the presidential candidate of the left,’ and Julián who must be a father even if he is only a man now married to Daniela’s mother. She is not his daughter to raise, like the sad songs of poverty and loss his mother sang as if they were joyful tunes, but he must make the best of it. After the loss of his former girlfriend, he let his bonsai plant shrivel up and nearly die in his grief, but to be a good father he must nourish and care for the daughter that is not his regardless of what happens to them. Otherwise, he will become just a blot on her life, like her biological father.

[A]lmost everyone her age had stepfathers or stepmothers, although they didn’t call them those derogatory names, perhaps because over the years they had accumulated numerous stepfathers and stepmothers—a long string of people whom they began to love but very quickly forgot, since they often disappeared, never to be seen again, or they only reappeared years later, by chance, in the line of the supermarket…She had only one stepfather, for which, she thinks now, she ought to feel fortunate.

The novella is drenched in this melancholy of lives drifting in and out of focus from one another, making one feel very alone in the world and that our ties with others are much less secure than we thought. Relationships come and go, mothers can reappear after having been absent all your life and then need your support, marriages dissolve with the children being the only evidence of the union aside from a few dusty wedding day videotapes; it is the children, the young, innocent people who carry the greatest scars that will fit unconsciously into their adult lives and relationships. Julián stands as the figure that can either wither away, or form an identity as a father, secure and strong to care and raise Daniela if her mother never returns, and his actions can have a heavy cost depending on which way he sways. What becomes most important are not the fragments of his life, the fragments of his marriage to Verónica, or even the future possibilities of Daniela’s life and her own share of fragmented memories, but the way all these fragments from each person come together to form one orchestration of a family. Each character taken individually is not enough to hold the focus of the novella as a protagonist; the protagonist is the family, specifically the father/daughter relationship, that is fighting to survive in a world where it is more and more common for these bonds to be neglected or discarded.

It would be better to close the book, close the books, and to face, all at once, not life, which is very big, but the fragile armor of the present. For now, the story goes on and Verónica hasn’t arrived; it’s best to keep that in view, repeat it a thousand and one times: when she comes home, the novel ends—the book continues until she comes home or until Julián is sure that she is not coming home again.

There is an exciting metafictional feature to Zambra’s writing. It is a novella of a man writing a short novella (which may or may not be Zambra’s earlier novella), and he carefully brushes up to the reader with a reminded that these are characters in his own story. It allows him to freely speculate on future events, clearing the table of Julián, and focus on Daniela without seeming to create a great chasm in the narrative. Julián reassures himself that he is not in a novel, a place where a missing person is sure to portend tragedy, allowing Zambra to discuss his own literary techniques while making an ironic joke since the reader is aware of Julián as a character. His subtle metafiction takes us into the realm where the lines between author, the author-as-narrator, and Julián become a hazy amalgamation while simultaneously being completely separate entities—we enter a place where true literary magic happens. The novella than takes on its own effect similar to Julián’s bedtime tales to Daniela with Zambra himself singing us a sweet lullaby of prose.

‘You’re never happy with what you are. It would be strange to be completely happy,' Julián tells Daniela. We all feel sadness and a desire to be more that what we are, but what really matters is actually being who we are. This is an overwhelmingly empathetic story about aiming to have ‘survived mediocrity’, be it through our jobs, our literature, our relationships, or any other way we push on despite any opposition. Though we may not achieve anything monumental, we always look for ‘A stable image to grasp hold of,’ and young children are looking to their parents for this, but where do they turn if the family is unstable. When we look back on our lives, we typically focus on those who were never there or those who were blots on our existence, as they are the scars we are easily able to examine. This novella is a plea to not be those blots on the people who need our care, a blot that is either erased and driven from our lives or haunts our every step. Zambra has created something extraordinary here, filling us with his minor chord but offering a fleeting note of hope before the last page falls. Like Julián, we must stop being self-absorbed, stuck on how the world affects us, and look to how we affect others. We are all beautiful like individual trees; each of us have our own private lives with roots that stretch back into the past and branches that reach out into the future. However, it is the way we must all come to live together as a forest of a family, or of humanity, that is truly beautiful and astonishing.
5/5

He repeats Emily Dickenson’s verses involuntarily, as if finding himself with his own voice: “Our share of night to bear/our share of morning.”