With his 2006 prose debut Bonsai, Alejandro Zambra was instantly named a writer to watch in his native Chile, a literary representative of the first generation to come of age under democracy. Eighteen years and many accolades later, his early experiment in radical concision—ten thousand words, sold as a novel—has been released in a new translation. Its subject is suitably youthful. We meet Julio and Emilia in high school, at the beginning of a torrid romance sustained by a shared enthusiasm for literature. (The relationship rapidly ends with an aborted reading of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.)
