Though this book made the Man Booker International Prize short list, I had planned to review it later, considering my recent post about Argentinian author Mariana Enriquez. But revisiting South America with Sophie Hughes’s translation of Alia Trabucco Zerán’s The Remainder is more than worthwhile.
This unusual novel explores the legacy of Southern Cone dictatorships through its three protagonists: Felipe, Iquela, and Paloma. Shared family history unites them, as their parents formed a resistance cell during the Chilean dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s. Felipe and Iquela are childhood friends, but when Paloma arrives back in Santiago to bury her mother, it triggers a madcap chain of events in which all three set off for Argentina in a hearse to retrieve the body. The Remainder’s two great strengths are its alternating narrators, allowing for effective shifts in tone, and its experimental form, which uses language and typography to examine loss, remembrance, and generational tension.
Normally I’m distrustful of multiple narrators, as they can be jarring. Here, this fractured style fits the characters’ struggles. Felipe, who narrates his sections as a single run-on sentence, opens the novel with macabre mathematics: “…how can I reconcile the death toll with the actual sum of the dead? by deducting…by using this apocalyptic maths to finally, once and for all…subtract them.” This calculus of absence fails to impose order upon a tangled web of remainders. Iquela’s mother, the sole survivor of the cell, is a recluse; Felipe’s grandmother frequently succumbs to despair; Paloma, who lives in Berlin, often seems bewildered by her parents’ home country.
While Felipe persists in this grim task, Iquela’s account orients us with a clear progression. Paloma’s parents escaped to Germany during the dictatorship era, but her mother recently died of breast cancer. She ships her body to Chile, but the plane is diverted to Argentina because of raining ash in Santiago. Unwilling to wait, she convinces the others to travel there in a rented hearse. If Felipe’s perspective falls well within the realm of South American gothic, then Iquela adds a humorous element that almost satirizes that genre. She mocks Felipe as “Mr. Light and Breezy” and describes how he sings “The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round” as they leave Santiago. For all their closeness, their relationship has a terrible precedent. During a time of torture and forced disappearances, one narrator’s father informed on the other, creating an orphan.
In The Remainder, form is crucial. Felipe’s chapters descend from 11 to 0, while Iquela’s are designated by open parentheses: “().” That blank space complements these three, whose lives often seem a disjointed afterthought to their parents’ activism. At one point, the parentheses are filled with a repeated sentiment from Iquela’s mother, whose memory is a “topography of her dead”: “(I do all of this for you I do all of this for you…).” Unlike the famed photographs of the disappeared, survivors’ histories feel surprisingly mundane; many older figures in The Remainder have gone into exile, divorced, or died of natural causes. Yet their children carry terrible knowledge, a realization that ‘a rat’ wasn’t a rodent, ‘a movement’ wasn’t an action, and ‘the front’ wasn’t the opposite of ‘the back.’” Sophie Hughes navigates these linguistic challenges expertly, depicting Paloma’s distinctive Spanish and the cell’s militant language in a way that English-language readers can understand and appreciate.
Coming of age under unique social and political pressure is a powerful theme emerging in this Woman in Translation Month series. As one of a generation of Chilean writers reckoning with a dark history, Zerán raises a compelling question: Do children who bear the weight of their parents’ past have a future? Sophie Hughes’ thoughtful rendition of this dilemma merits every accolade it has earned.
Alia Trabucco Zerán, The Remainder, trans. Sophie Hughes (Coffee House Press, 2019)
Photo Credit: Suddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy Stock Photo.
Throughout Women in Translation Month, I’m reviewing recent, acclaimed translations. Read previous editions here and here.
This book just seems to beg for comparison with Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, which also has multiple narrators, strange language, a sort of serio-comic treatment of material, and some of the same themes!
What a compelling thought! It hadn’t occurred to me while writing the review, but you’re right. Faulkner is one of the few authors in English I trust with multiple narrators. Comparing this novel with As I Lay Dying also makes me think about how absence versus presence of the dead can provide a different perspective on loss. Addie’s corpse is such a strange and visceral focal point in that novel (I’m thinking of all those passages about the stench of her body); it’s as if her matriarch status persists posthumously. Here, the fact that they go in search of the body feels telling. In this context, the dictatorship’s most sinister legacy is a gulf between past and present that cannot be breached. Faced with this vast emptiness, those left behind must construct their own versions of the past and future. Thanks for this thoughtful point.