8 Possibly True Tales of our Fathers: Autofiction and Memory Recovery in Two Southern Cone Novels
“the true story of what I saw and how I saw it … which is after all the only thing I have to offer.” –Jack Kerouac
“We are survivors, we endure the death of others… what will we do with this inheritance?”—Marcelo Cohen
For as long as there’s been language, people have been telling stories. And for as long as people have been telling stories, they’ve been telling them about themselves. In modern times we refer to fictional stories of a certain length as novels. When those lengthy stories concern nonfictional truths about ourselves we call them memoirs or, when they attempt to capture an entire life, autobiographies. Novels, memoirs, and autobiographies are types, or genres, of narrative storytelling. Readers distinguish between genres to make sense of the world of letters while booksellers use them to boost sales. Either way, genre classification prepares the reader for the reading experience at hand or aids them in their choices of what to read next. When I’m in the mood for romance, it helps to head to the section of the local bookstore labelled Romance. When I open the pages to that romance, I don’t expect to find a spy thriller or a sci-fi fantasy. And so it goes.
There are, of course, alternative pleasures. The pleasure of surprise, and even frustration, when the story we pick up challenges our sense of order if not of reality itself. Rather than conforming to generic categories, the earliest novels of our modern literary era frequently blurred lines, not only between comedy, tragedy, and romance, but between truth and fiction, reality and the fantastic. Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders presented itself as an actual autobiographical account of a woman’s rise from rags to riches. Similarly, Joseph Fielding’s Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews, Richardson’s Clarissa and Pamela, and even Lawrence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy. While Cervantes’s masterpiece, Don Quijote, didn’t play at the game of autobiography, it certainly preyed upon the inability of gullible readers to distinguish true accounts from fictional storytelling and drew special attention to the comic consequences of such confusions.
Since those earliest days of what has been called the rise of the novel, the play between autobiographical truth and novelistic fiction has waxed and waned but never disappeared entirely. Disappearance would be unlikely in a literary genre so open to experiment that André Gide once called it “lawless.” Unlike traditional poetry or drama, the novel was born out of rule breaking. It was the genre of the common man written in the common tongue (thus its French name roman, from Romance, a reference to the language of the people as opposed to the Latin of scholars and clergy). From its origins the novel had no use for classical obligations to time, place, or purpose to say nothing of fixed schema of rhyme and meter. Novelists were born free and continue so today. Such freedom can’t help but breed a certain self-consciousness on the part of its bearers while simultaneously allowing the same self-conscious writer the sweet, lazy liberty to reflect on it and even play with it in his or her writing. Thus such self-consciousness inevitably works its way back, time and again, into the novel.15 For all the high moral seriousness of late-nineteenth-century realism, the playful experiments of Joyce’s Ulysses or Unamuno’s Niebla awaited just around the corner. Later the sober-minded, sometimes thesis-driven social realism of much of the 1940s and 1950s fiction soon gave way to the wild postmodernist experiments of the 1960s and 1970s “new” novels from Cortázar’s Hopscotch and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to the novels of the Goytisolo brothers and Robbe-Grillet. And so the story goes.
In the last two decades literary self-consciousness has returned yet again in still another form. We can locate a possible starting point, at least in Spanish-language narrative, in the literary project of Spain’s Javier Marías, commencing with a novel-memoir Todas las almas [All Souls] (1989) and concluding with Negra espalda del tiempo [Dark Back of Time] (1998)—or perhaps with Tú rostro mañana [Your Face Tomorrow] (2007)—if not with yet another unclassifiable work still to come. In the first installment, sold as a discreet, stand-alone novel, Marías reflects on a two-year stint spent as visiting faculty at Oxford a decade earlier. Gobbled up by readers at the time as a roman-a-clef, the novel became so much more nine years later when Marías released the generically unclassifiable Negra espalda del tiempo. Negra espalda begins with the enigmatic and intriguing passage, “I believe I’ve still never mistaken fiction for reality, though I have mixed them together more than once” (7). The intrigue is heightened by the fact that Negra espalda will prove to be itself a commentary on the false roman-a-clef, Todas las almas. It realizes this commentary by, this time, using the real names for the Todas las almas characters, even while the narrator (who Marías never attempts to distinguish from himself) continues to insist that he never writes anything that isn’t in the end fictional. Thanks to a series of engaging side narratives and an organizational web that subtly ultimately ties together so many of these apparently loose narrative ends, Marías’s novel-memoir-essay leaves readers as absorbed as they are confused.
Marías’s narrative project remained, along with similar games being played around the same time by fellow countryman Enrique Vila-Matas (El mal de Montano [2002] or París no se acaba nunca [2003]) the Argentine writers, Mempo Giardinelli (Final de novela en Patagonia [2000]) and César Aira (Cómo me hice monja [1993]), and possibly the Mexican author, Sergio Pitol (Trilogía de la memoria [1996–2005]), a rather select esoteric flavor for the most demanding readers. In the early years of the twenty-first century, however, the taste for such games took a more popular turn. In 2001, Spaniard Javier Cercas’s novel Soldados de Salamina, became a surprise hit, presenting the story of a frustrated novelist known as Javier Cercas, who parleys a newspaper assignment into a novel about the Spanish civil war. That novel turns out to be, of course, the work we readers hold in our hands. The mixture of exploring what was until then Spain’s much neglected and often willfully forgotten past by way of a narrative game involving a frustrated and thus often reluctant narrator worked cash-register wonders. On reflection, its playful half-truth/half-fiction approach appears to have provided its readers a kind of safe space from which the Spanish masses could peer into their difficult past. The effect was extraordinary. Soldados topped the best-seller lists in Spain for months and made Cercas, previously a second- or third-tier writer in his native land, an overnight literary celebrity. With Soldados, Cercas found himself the author of a best-selling book, a relatively more highbrow work which became de riguer reading for the educated masses and which was soon adapted to the big screen by one of Spain’s top filmmakers.
Such success, not surprisingly, became the catalyst for not one but two literary phenomena of the ensuing decade. First, Spanish readers suddenly found the shelves at local bookstores inundated with civil war novels, culminating in the relatively massive tomes of Almudena Grandes (El corazón helado [2007]), Manuel Rivas (Los libros arden mal [2007]), and Antonio Muñoz Molina (La noche de los tiempos [2009]), the phenomenon mischievously noted in the title of Isaac Rosa’s own 2007 novel about the war, ¡Otra maldita novela sobre la Guerra civil!. Of more enduring literary import was the coterminous boom in what came to be known, in this most recent and more populist iteration, as autofiction. While autofiction continued to be produced in the same game-like way employed by Vila-Matas or Marías, as in the former’s aforementioned París no se acaba nunca (2003), in the ensuing years it appeared that writers had taken a note from Cercas. Autofiction became a way to work through sensitive subjects that felt too close to home for traditional storytelling. Such was the case with Carme Riera’s own Spanish civil war novel, La mitad del alma (2003) or Claudia Piñero’s tale of a childhood during Argentina’s Dirty War, Un comunista en calzonillos (2013), or, perhaps, Horacio Castellanos Moya’s novelistic treatment of Guatemala’s legacy of violence, Insensatez (2006). Each of these were novels that couched stories of difficult times within a larger framework that foregrounded the storytelling process itself.
The year 2010 was a particularly fertile year for the autofiction genre. In Spain, Marcos Torrente Giralt won the prestigious Premio Nacional de Narrativa for his memoir/novel Tiempo de vida, while Argentina’s Patricio Pron and Chile’s Alejandro Zambra confirmed their early literary promise with their respective novels El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia and Formas de volver a casa. These latter two novels followed the basic format of Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina: frustrated authors overcome writer’s block by exploring their respective countries’ politically fraught pasts. Their approaches, however, were significantly pared down, telling stories much closer to home and of a much humbler nature, a consequence of the fact that both were narrating events they and their family members had actually lived through in contrast to Cercas who was trying to understand a war from which he was now three generations removed. Instead of archival research to figure out wars of yesteryear, both Pron and Zambra feature protagonists eerily similar to themselves and who find themselves seeking reconciliation with parents by way of confronting their countries’ respective authoritarian pasts.16
The confrontations in both novels are quite oblique. Unlike Cercas’s novel about the Spanish civil war, these are not novels explicitly about the Argentine Proceso or Pinochet’s Chile. Rather, their narrators address the intimate affairs of relatively normal families and their own rather undramatic but still poignant suffering as offspring of the traumatized. They are members of what Ana Ros has called Argentina and Chile’s Post-Dictatorship Generation, children who experienced their country’s most brutal historical periods through the relatively ignorant prism of youth but who, nonetheless, bear the scars of the era.
Patricio Pron’s El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia [My Father’s Ghost is Climbing in the Rain] presents the most obvious scarring. The novel begins at the conclusion of the author, narrator, and protagonist’s (from here on referred to simply as the autofictional Pron) eight-year stay in Germany, a time in which he worked, wrote, traveled, but left with nothing to show for it. The whole period feels like an utter loss to him. Of most of his time there, he has little to no memory. The consumption of a handful of prescribed medications has left him with only the faintest sense of a handful of random places and sensations. More tragic still, he has, in fact, no recollection of why he was even medicated.
The eight years of stupor come to an abrupt close when he learns via a routine phone call to his parents back home that his father lies gravely ill in a local hospital. The plot from this point forward is almost impossibly simple. Upon arrival on home soil, hoping to make some sense of the life of his dying father, the protagonist pours his energy into reading through his father’s papers. One archive in particular catches his interest, a file stuffed with newspaper clippings from a variety of local and national news sources. Together they tell the tale of the disappearance of a man from a town where his father had been raised through to early adulthood. According to the clippings, the man in question, sixty-one years of age at the time of his disappearance and described by his associates as childlike in his intelligence, has been seduced by a woman purporting to be his lover who hopes, with the help of friends, to appropriate the man’s property, insurance benefits, and savings. Additional clippings tell how the people of the town take to the streets demanding information on the man’s disappearance. The manifestations grow over the course of days and then weeks, soon becoming a national cause célebre. Eventually the man’s body is found in a well, the woman and her accomplices are located, and what we assume to be the right people are tried, judged, and sentenced. In the end it’s all a fairly routine crime story.
The only outstanding features are, for readers, the dramatic public outcry at the man’s disappearance, and the reason for this humble, childlike man’s possessing such wealth. The victim, we learn through the autofictional Pron’s investigation, was the brother of a woman disappeared by the military junta during the early years of the Argentine Proceso, or Dirty War of the late 1970s and early 1980s. As her next of kin, the man has received from the democratic government that replaced the junta a significant indemnity payment as part of an official reparations program, notwithstanding his utter lack of comprehension of what the money is for or what to do with it. Of particular note to our author is that the sister’s name when listed in the newspaper clippings has been circled in red repeatedly by the person compiling the file. That person, our narrator and protagonist assumes, is his father.
Apart from these basic facts of the story itself, we readers are inevitably puzzled by the autoficational Pron’s otherwise lack of interest in storytelling. The content of this side story occupies well over a third of Pron’s entire novel, but contains almost no actual narration. The nearly seventy pages are filled almost exclusively with simple newspaper clippings. Many of these are poorly written, and nearly all offer overlapping information so that the development of the barest of plots—that which involves the kidnapping and ultimately the murder of the simpleton—proceeds in fits and starts and at a rather glacial pace. Moreover, the repetition of so many clippings ensures that our understanding of the kidnap and murder is built from frequently contradictory information. At the same time, the contradictions are often of such a trivial nature that rather than problematize the narrative, catching the reader up into an intriguing interpretive game, they serve only to slow the narrative further.
The autofictional Pron rarely interjects his own thoughts into this parade of clippings, typically doing so only to inform his readers of the general physical details of the file itself. On a handful of occasions, he shares general reflections on his own brief childhood spent in the town where the crime takes place. Less frequently still, he pauses to take a stab at making sense of the very existence of the file. Why such a meticulous and thorough archive surrounding this crime, he asks. But though he asks, the answers or even pieces of possible answers are hardly forthcoming. Moreover, just as often as he seeks explanation, he narrates as if he were trying to make the newspaper clippings even more confusing and unreadable by performing a form of editing that is anything but helpful: “Al nacimiento de El Trébol (ilegible). No habiendo un acto único ni una voluntad expresa relacionada con momento alguno, la determinación de la fecha fundacional (tachado a mano). La situación resulta más complicada aún por haberse trazado casi simultáneamente tres urbanizaciones (…)” [The birth of El Trébol [illegible]. There was no single act or explicit desire [crossed out]. The situation is even further complicated by the almost simultaneous design of three towns: […]] (65). We can conclude only that our protagonist is going out of his way to make any simple enjoyment of this would-be murder mystery almost impossible.
Whatever the case, the overall feeling for readers is a sense of abandonment, as we wonder while we reflect on the seemingly mundane details of an ultimately unremarkable murder, however significant the connection between the victim and his late activist sister may have once seemed. While it is true that our protagonist eventually discovers a connection between the victim’s sister and his own parents in the Peronist resistance, the exact nature of that connection is never made explicit. In later sections, after our protagonist has finished the file and is spending more time with his family, including time keeping vigil at his father’s bedside, we do gather a few more details, specifically that it was the autofictional Pron’s father who first introduced the victim’s sister to politics and the Peronist youth movements. This introduction, we learn, resulted from his parents’ participation in Guardia de Hierro, a left-leaning Peronist faction active between 1962 and 1974. We also learn that thanks to the relatively mild nature of Guardia de Hierro in comparison to the Peronist Montoneros plus the fact that it voluntarily disbanded prior to the 1975 military coup, his parents ended up escaping the worst abuses of the dictatorship. We learn also that the sister of the kidnapped and murdered man, in contrast, became politically radicalized, moving on from Guardia de Hierro to join the Montoneros, a move that most likely led to her disappearance and murder.
For all that information, we remain in the dark about the father’s connections to say nothing of his responsibility beyond that earliest indoctrination. Why he obsessively clipped, marked, and filed so many newspaper articles on the same subject remains a mystery. Despite the protagonist’s frequent lengthy vigils at his father’s bedside, we never hear his father utter a word, let alone one that might clarify matters. We are left instead with the clippings, the mere reportage of the news. And so the autofictional Pron as well as we the readers are left to wonder and, again, to wander. The novel, in the end, denies us any clear explanation of the Argentine Dirty War or of the struggles of those who lived through it. In that sense, readers may find themselves disappointed.
But we should recall that this was not the principal enigma that initiated our story. This is, we remember, autofiction, a form that delights in confusing the author with his narrator, who also happens to be our protagonist. This author’s problem, we recall is not the Dirty War nor Argentine history nor the understanding of a botched kidnapping turned murder. His problem is simply his own psychic state, one that has left him in a drugged-up stupor for the entirety of his adult life until now. And it is the enigma of his own self that the novel does finally resolve. Ironically, it does so through the frustrated process of deciphering the meaning of the files. Only through the attempt to decipher the enigmatic archive—not through their solution—does the author understand at last the brutal nature of a childhood that never made sense, that he tried to block out, and that has been haunting him ever since without his even realizing it.
With this, the novel becomes a recovery not of the official “disappeared ones” but of the disappeared childhoods, the destroyed innocence, and the disjointed existence of a generation of children who lived the Dirty War innocently but not unaffected; a generation who suffered indirectly, uncomprehendingly, the fears, frustrations, tears, and terror of their parents. In this way it answers critics who, according to Pron himself, believed that discussions of Argentina’s Dirty War were best left to the older generations who had lived it (Schulman 55). Pron’s novel shows that the war was a matter for all, an experience that has produced, read allegorically, a generation of exiles fleeing the psychological traumas of the country of their birth. While the autofictional Pron enjoys the luxury of physical flight, hiding away in Germany for eight years, the vast majority of his generation endure an ongoing inner exile within a home country that will never be home until that pain is confronted. If such a reading teaches anything it is that the children will eventually return, that the fathers and mothers cannot be forgotten, and that while complete understanding of what happened and why—to say nothing of final historical truth—may never be found, emotional reconciliation might be possible.
In the novel itself, this reconciliation begins with the protagonist’s simple return to Argentina. The return allows him to face and then slowly work through what are not always meaningful, and frequently mundane, historical facts: documents, documents, and more documents that can never directly uncover the truths that really matter. Rather it is the search that liberates. Painstaking research provides ample time for reflection. Perhaps more importantly, it promotes family conversations and, even more simply, encourages our protagonist to just spend time with his siblings and parents.
In the midst of this time of slow discovery and recovery, our protagonist pays a visit one afternoon to a local museum which features a video with information regarding his father’s Peronist past. His afternoon there takes the form of a kind of pilgrimage to and then vigil at a site of official memory recovery. As with the investigation of the clippings or the time spent with family, nothing dramatic happens while there. Even so, standing before a video that repeats itself in an endless loop—a kind of extreme microcosm of his exploration of the file clippings—he at last achieves a certain form of enlightenment. But it’s an enlightenment not of information—of content—but of its lack. As Geoffrey Maguire describes in his excellent reading of the work, while Pron’s novel offers some facts, it reveals even greater gaps in our author’s understanding, symbolized in the sudden cessation of his father’s voice on the video display when the museum closes for the night (214). The symbolic disconnection becomes the very driving force of the novel.
This force manifests itself most clearly in a final chapter wherein the autofictional Pron begins to remember and to reflect on his childhood and at last discover some historical material that describes succinctly and coherently the details of his parents’ Peronist past. But before this period of recollection and writing, our protagonist falls ill. What he reports from those days is a series of dreams, organized into thirteen short sections. Each begins with the words “Soñé” [I dreamed] and offers a glimpse into childhood memories including the author’s relationship with his father. Unlike the material in the museum or the newspaper clippings, the memories drawn from these dreams are utterly unreliable. Ironically, it is only in the aftermath of these unreliable memories that our author-protagonist begins at last to remember.
The process, of course, problematizes all those more straightforward historical details that follow, that which he will remember in contrast to what he has dreamed. Not only is the truth process more important than the truth product, but the process permanently undermines any truth it might produce, as Maguire has shown (216). Historical memory is not history. It does not produce historical truth. It is nonetheless a process with its own possibilities for liberation and restoration. It is possible, moreover, only by way of that process.
The autofictional Pron’s final recovery, he realizes in this last chapter, is coming, this time in the form of this story itself. In composing the story we hold in our hands, he attempts to make personal sense of the data which then provides the spark to begin to recover his forgotten past. The process, like the novel itself, is not easy, nor is it superficially entertaining. It’s carried out by a suffering writer and imposed upon what are at times long-suffering readers who repeatedly find themselves asking why. But as the the protagonist comes to understand, there will be no simple answers. Instead, the spirit of his parents—their memory, their memories, their pain, their persistence, their triumph, in short, their legacy—will continue on, forever rising as if in the rain that pours down outside his window as the novel ends. For all of life’s challenges, the legacy of his parents and their generation remains. It will persist. We can resist at our own peril and spend wasted decades of mind-numbing stupor. Or we can come to terms with it, confront it, stand before it—its memorials and its files—and sit beside it, in the form of its slowly dying victims, even if they never give us the clear answers we may think we seek.
Pron’s story’s concluding image is of the autofictional Pron and his father standing together over “la boca negra de un pozo en el que yacen todos los muertos de la Historia argentina, todos los desamparados y los desfavorecidos y los muertos porque intentaron oponer una violencia tal vez justa a una violencia profundamente injusta y a todos lo que mató el Estado argentino, el Estado que gobierna sobre ese país donde tan solo los muertos entierran a los muertos” [the black mouth of the well in which lie all the dead of Argentine history, all the defenseless and underprivileged; those who died trying to oppose a deeply unjust violence with a possibly just violence; and all those killed by the Argentine state, the government that rules over a land where only the dead bury the dead] (192).
Meanwhile, across the Cordillera…
The Chilean Alejandro Zambra’s autofictional take on his own country’s experience with military dictatorship begins in less painful fashion than Pron’s. Less painful and also less direct. In Formas de volver a casa [Ways of Going Home], Zambra’s autofictional alter ego, Alejandro Zambra, recalls an episode from his youth when as a rather innocent nine-year-old boy he enjoyed a night of impromptu tent camping with the kids on his block. The occasion was Chile’s 1985 earthquake, the impromptu camping “trip” a simple neighborhood attempt to get some sleep beyond the danger of collapsing buildings. In contrast to Pron’s miserable, medicated, frustrated adult writer, this autofictional protagonist is young and carefree. Beyond the obligations of school, his life consists of game playing with the neighborhood kids: first earthquake make-believe and, in the next paragraph, baseball.
Unfortunate for him, but fortunate for his story, he struggles at the U.S. import. So when the neighborhood boys gather in the coming days to take their turns at bat, our protagonist goes for a walk. Over the following week, as the baseball continues, so do the walks. Within days of his first stroll, he is approached by Claudia, a girl just a few years older, whose acquaintance he made the night of the earthquake. A bit smitten by the girl’s beauty and confidence, our protagonist agrees to keep an eye on her uncle, who just so happens to be the protagonist’s reclusive, mysterious next-door neighbor.
And so the story proceeds with the autofictional Zambra making observations of minor interest about the uncle’s life organized around regular meetings with Claudia, likewise of minor interest, during which those routine reports are delivered. Until, that is, the day when our protagonist tracks the return journey of a man who calls at the neighbor’s house. His sleuthing leads him across the entirety of the city of Santiago and to the front steps of what turns out to be Claudia’s own house. When our protagonist goes to report his findings, instead of winning the kudos he expects for his efforts, Claudia receives him with cold indifference. After a handful of further confusingly cold meetings, Claudia calls off his mission entirely. He never sees Claudia again. End of story.
Except at this point we’re only thirty-four pages into what we presume to be the novel we hold in our hands. Something is amiss.
What is amiss, we discover upon turning the page, is that this wasn’t the autofiction at all but rather a fiction within the actual autofiction of—once again—a frustrated adult writer whose life is going off the rails. In the pseudo-Zambra’s case (the real autofictional Zambra and not the fictional autofictional Zambra of the previous sections), it’s his marriage that has failed alongside his writing. Failed intimacy is, according to Mary Lusky Friedman, one of the outstanding characteristics of the young writers of Zambra’s generation (613). Unlike Pron, the new autofictional-Zambra hasn’t left the country. But while he’s still in the Santiago area he lives a fair distance from his childhood home and rarely pays it a visit. As his own story progresses, we learn that his relationship with his parents, especially with his father, though cordial, is strained. We also discover that, like the protagonist of his false autofiction, as a child the autofictional Zambra was also given to wandering, once riding a bus line across Santiago just to see where it would take him. Despite similarities with the nine-year-old in his novel, this new Zambra takes pains to assure us that this section is the authentic autofiction we only thought we were reading in the first. Here he foregrounds his struggles as a novelist, from meditations on his devastating writer’s block to details on such mundane matters as settling on a name for the character he has called Claudia.
And yet, in the very discussion of his writing profession he reopens the door to metafictional mayhem. He acknowledges in passing his need to reconcile himself to his parents by way of the process of narrating his life under their watch from childhood to the present. In the process, he includes a conversation with his sister about the reasons for including or excluding certain characters from this narration. He would never tell her story, he assures her, but adds that he would tell that of his parents. Because he must. His sister, however, is off limits because there’s no need to drag her into a story that can only ultimately be unfair to her. Except that, of course, that is exactly what he is doing in writing about his conversation with her—if Zambra even has a sister, of course! And so confusion seeps in, tugging our attention repeatedly from fiction to metafiction, from the world of fantasy to the much less comfortable space of a strongly constructed pseudoreality that we know is not reality even if the narrative game constantly tricks our minds into experiencing it as such. The effect, according to Luis Fernanda Barraza Caballero and María Rita Plancarte Martínez, is to challenge almost from the beginning any binary opposition readers might seek between true and false versions of the past, or perhaps even between the present and the past it pretends to understand (110). In this way the novel becomes, for Daniel Voionmaa, a reflection not just on the past but on the condition of literature and its ability to make sense of that past (150). From within this fog the plot unfolds. Over the course of the above-noted conversations and recollections, our autofictional Zambra engages in a slow fencemending with his estranged partner. As our hero at last nears completion of the novel that will definitively end his writer’s block, romantic reconciliation and the renewal of a kind of domestic bliss appear to be just over the horizon.
At this point of reconciliation, as we might expect, the narration ends and we return to the story of the nine-year-old baseball-averse boy, now all grown up and suddenly nostalgic for the Claudia of his youth. Finding her proves surprisingly easy. The hard part comes in the truths that follow. Claudia now lives in self-imposed exile, like the Argentine Pron in his own autofiction, but in her case in the United States. She has returned to Chile following her father’s recent passing. On return, she has discovered herself to be as much a stranger in her homeland as in her adopted country. Both her parents are deceased, and her relationship with a sister still living in Santiago is strained. Over the course of the next few weeks, she reveals to our protagonist that the uncle she asked him to spy on so many years ago was, in fact, her father, living under her uncle’s name and separated from the family in order to protect them while he engaged in anti-Pinochet activity. While her father and the family emerged at the end of the Pinochet regime physically unscathed, the emotional scars of those years have left their mark, including on the surviving younger generation. In the present, Claudia’s sister bitterly wastes away her days tenaciously holding on to the old family home, even as Claudia has attempted to make a new life for herself in the very country most responsible for the dictatorship that caused their family so much grief. In the process, the sisters have become bitter enemies. As if desperately seeking some sense of home or belonging, within days of their first meeting, Claudia moves into the narrator’s apartment, where the two of them console each other with stories from the Pinochet years.
Their relationship culminates with a visit to the old neighborhood. There they spend the night at the narrator’s childhood home, providing opportunity for lengthy conversations with the narrator’s parents. Claudia’s story—her father living in the guise of her uncle in the neighboring house—opens the door to a series of fragmented political discussions as awkward as they are brief. While Claudia’s family was actively resisting the Pinochet regime, the narrator’s parents, we learn, were living rather mundane apolitical lives, suffering no greater drama than the earthquake that opened the novel or than the misadventures of their wandering nine-year-old. The earthquake, for Barraza Caballero and Plancarte Martínez, symbolically destabilizes this middle-class existence as well as providing a fault line along which past and present in the novel separate (107). But for the father, it, like the Pinochet regime itself, is of little significance. Here, Edgar Tello García explains, is manifest evidence of the tragic gap between one generation’s memories and another’s, and thus the inability of victims to forge a common memory that might contest the victor’s history (99, 102).
Understanding the impossibility of reconciliation with his father, our protagonist concludes his visit with his mother with a late-night conversation that soon becomes almost verbatim a late-night conversation between the autofictional Zambra and his mother in the authentic autofiction recounted in the prior section. While there are certainly differences between the two, those differences are so unnecessary as to call attention to themselves: the justification of a late-night smoke or the slightly distinct response to a favorite book. On the one hand, there seems to be no other reason for such slight but obvious distinctions than to foreground the difference—or lack thereof—between the fiction and the autofiction. On the other, the overall similarities of plot and narrative voice and style—those more significant narratological matters—blur the distinction we readers might attempt to grab hold of to obtain the clarity we seek. Moreover, as Lusky Friedman points out, more often than not the fictional account precedes the autofictional account (620). The tactic foregrounds the potential fictionality of the autofiction scene as much as the potential authenticity of the fictional one. With this deep blurring well underway, the visit ends, and the new couple returns to the narrator-protagonist’s home only to have Claudia announce her intention to return to the United States as soon as possible. The visit to the childhood home has proven not just awkward but fatal to the relationship. And so, within a matter of days, the narrator loses Claudia while remaining as distant as ever from his parents. Alone, once again.
Once Claudia is gone, as in the first half of the novel, the fiction within the autofiction (which has foregrounded, via the late-night mother-son conversation, its own potential fictionality) cedes the word back to the now suspect autofiction itself. Here, we recall that, when we last left them, the authentically autofictional Zambra was almost fully reconciled to his partner. Unfortunately, as this section opens, he has decided to share with her his latest novel, a story which turns out to be, as far as we can tell, what we have just read in the first and third sections of our novel—the tale of Claudia. In Claudia, however, the autofictional Zambra’s wife recognizes herself. She is offended, rather than flattered. She sees our hero as appropriating her own painful, politically shaped childhood in order to kick-start his writing career. To the autofictional Zambra, he is simply exorcising his own ghosts by working through the legacy of an apolitical childhood in a deeply political culture. But to those like his estranged partner, who suffered acutely the pains of Pinochet, his story feels like mere exploitation. She has no patience for that. And so, as in the just-concluded story of Claudia, another version of Zambra again finds himself alone.
Following her departure, the final pages of his autofiction read like daily journal entries. Instead of these pages forming a coherent story as before, they now principally constitute brief notes of random, real-time musings along with several pieces of his own poetry akin to the autofictional Pron’s anti-rational “I dream” sequence. Here, however, the jumble of nonsequitous paragraphs indicates an apparent return of writer’s block. This, of course, denies him the ability to finish the very story we are reading, which is not the fictional one but supposedly his very own. There will be no closure.
But then suddenly the autofictional Zambra, alongside every other character in his autofictional world, suffers another, now bookending, earthquake. The seismic event, as in his youth, affords families and friends an opportunity to reach beyond their comfort zones and check on each other’s well-being. Once more, neighbors huddle together in solidarity against the dangers of aftershocks and yet-to-collapse walls. While his neighbors gather, the autoficational Zambra, finds himself wandering across the city. His path this time takes him to the street of the woman who is now definitively his ex. He hears her voice, and with that he turns around to head back home. While she will never be his again, he knows she is okay. And that is enough.
***
Indeed, enough and not a bit more appears to be the most either Zambra’s or Pron’s autofictional alter egos can expect. As in Pron’s autofiction, the Zambra-based character finds final reconciliation with his father to be impossible. In the Argentine novel, full restoration of a lost past is equally frustrated. Too many have already and forever disappeared. There is no indication that the autofictional Pron’s father will ever come out of an apparent coma. He too has disappeared. The violence in the Zambra novel is more subtle, perhaps more in keeping with the experience of the Pinochet years, a much longer era than that of the Argentine Proceso, years that though begun in a violent coup ended two decades later in a peaceful transition to democracy. Zambra’s character still enjoys—for better or worse—the company and possible conversation of his parents. With them he can, in theory, still explore the past. And yet any attempt to do so appears to only further divide. If such is the case within the family, beyond the safety of hearth and home, any other communion appears impossible, severing relationships both fictional and real (or fictionally real). Like the autofictional Pron, the children of Pinochet have lived a nightmare without fully comprehending the fact. Connection, indeed communion, among them is possible only if they continue forward in ignorance. When they confront, either through reminiscence—as in the case of Claudia and the narrator-protagonist of her story—or writing—as in the case of the ex-partner and the autofictional Zambra—they disconnect. That disconnection leaves us without any kind of ending beyond the inconclusive ramblings of both Zambra and Pron as they finish their novels, writing increasingly random passages that do little to advance their stories in traditional, plot-driven fashion.17
Zambra’s novel, like Pron’s, ultimately explores the effects of violence on a generation that lived their nation’s respective authoritarian regimes as what the novel calls “secondary characters.” The real story belonged to the parents. And this, perhaps above all else, explains the relative lack of story in both autofictions. Their story, the story of the children, is not the story but its aftermath. Their story is not so much a story as it is psychotherapy. Which explains why reconciliation is ultimately only with the self. Even so, the takeaway from Zambra’s novel, as with Pron’s, is, if not terribly upbeat, in the end positive. To be sure, for now love—in the case of Claudia—or simple reconciliation—in the case of Zambra’s ex-partner—are off the table. But for all that, when the earthquake hits or the family emergency arises, there are still automatically the wandering feet that take the protagonists in the direction of home. This care, the new home, may not lead to perfect understanding or even reconciliation. But it does provide the knowledge that we’re safe, that things are okay, that we will go on, living to die, or perhaps to reunite, another day. Perhaps for now, for this generation, after what they did and didn’t live through, that is enough.
