From the Bookshelf of The Read Around The World Book Club…

The Remainder

Alia Trabucco Zerán,

Sophie Hughes (Translator)

Start date: December 31, 2019

Finish date: January 31, 2020

Discussion: CHILE - January 2020

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Showing 2 of 2 topics — 31 comments total

CHILE - January 2020

First half of the book
By Melanie · 15 posts · 52 views

last updated Jan 28, 2020 05:48PM

Second half
By Melanie · 10 posts · 29 views

last updated Jan 21, 2020 10:38AM

What Members Thought

Jan 15, 2020 Britta Böhler rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2buddy-reads, femlit, fiction, fiction-transl, 2020debut, 2020trans-lit, global-south, 01women1001, 01women1001-read, fiction-literay

4.5*

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Jan 18, 2020 Jo rated it really liked it · review of another edition

The Remainder is alternately narrated by Felipe and Iquala, childhood friends in Chile whose parents were militants during the Pinochet dictatorship. They are joined by Paloma, the German daughter of another of these militants whose mother has died in Germany and who has requested repatriation in Chile.

Felipe’s chapters are entirely stream of consciousness in one long sentence and have a rhythmic, haunting quality particularly as he is obsessed with the dying, with finding the remainder, the pe The Remainder is alternately narrated by Felipe and Iquala, childhood friends in Chile whose parents were militants during the Pinochet dictatorship. They are joined by Paloma, the German daughter of another of these militants whose mother has died in Germany and who has requested repatriation in Chile.

Felipe’s chapters are entirely stream of consciousness in one long sentence and have a rhythmic, haunting quality particularly as he is obsessed with the dying, with finding the remainder, the perfect balance between the number of graves and the number of people who died, a statement perhaps on the forced disappearances during Pincohet’s rule. Iquala’s chapters are more straightforward in their narrative style but still infused with this sense of confusion and conflict as she is torn between her suffocating mother and the past.

There is an almost apocalyptic feel to the novel with the ash that falls from the sky in Santiago and Felipe’s obsession with death and it becomes a journey that tests the relationship between the three while undertones of the past keep rearing their head. The surreal, almost dreamlike quality of the novel could divide readers, particularly Felipe’s chapters, and sometimes they literally become trippy. The novel is short and tightly constructed but this does mean that you can be left wanting more, to know more about the past and about these characters. Nevertheless this is a compelling novel that plays with words, the idea of seeing and death and the translation seems to be excellent; definitely an author to watch.

Some favorite lines

‘We barely spoke facing each other, and even more rarely over dinner. My eyes were the problem; I didn’t know how to hold that gaze, how to bear the weight of all those things she’d seen.’

‘And I switched off again, trying to avoid falling under the weight of those sentences, convinced, as I had been as a little girl, that we don’t live for a set number of years, but rather that we’re assigned a set number of words that we can hear over the course of our lives…Each of my mother’s words was worth a hundred, a thousand regular ones, and killed me quicker. Perhaps that’s why I’d learned another language: to buy myself more time.’

‘That heat even found its way into landfills and hospitals, filling the city with a stench of everything stirred together, of a molten us.’

‘I followed her instructions until I noticed the incorrect names, the altered distances, the geography of a bygone city (she was directing us out of a city from another time).’

‘Rootless names with no antecedents or surnames, which made them feel fictional, lent them a certain lightness that allowed me to believe, if only for a second, that the whole thing had been one big lie. Only characters from novels had just a first name.’
...more

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Mar 09, 2023 Kin rated it liked it

Shelves: chile

It's flawed, but thematically and stylistically interesting. I believe it could be great if it was pared down a bit. It's strange to say about a 200-page book, but it's just too long. ...more

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Jan 14, 2020 Ed rated it liked it · review of another edition

I liked it, i really did. But i can't help to want more of this story and those characters.

I'm used to read big books so it's kind of a departure for me as the book is thin and the plot quite simple. Alia Trabucco Zeran has a writting style very personnal and promising. It's colorful, metaphorical. There are magical realism touches here and there. A travel in the subsconscious of our three main characters. But i wanted to be more invested, i wanted to know the characters better ( Iquela, Paloma ...more

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Jan 12, 2020 Marie rated it liked it

Shelves: ebook, ratw-book-club, around-the-world, library-books

Probably an issue with me, rather than the book; I guess I just do not get along with stream-of-consciousness narratives (even more so when they are drug-induced). So every alternate chapter of this was a real slog to get through. It’s a shame, because the more straightforward sections narrated by Iquela are really great.

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