The Remainder

Starred review from June 24, 2019
Zerán’s lyrical, surrealistic debut, shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, explores the long shadows of Chile’s brutal Pinochet dictatorship. Chapters in the voice of the sensible Iquela alternate with those from the manic yet often insightful viewpoint of her longtime friend Felipe Arrabal. As the novel opens, the two Santiago residents are about 30. Translator Iquela copes with the clinginess of her widowed mother, Consuelo, a former anti-Pinochet activist, while Felipe believes he sees dead bodies everywhere and obsesses over calculations attempting to match their numbers against recorded births. Consuelo’s friend Ingrid dies, leaving a request that her body be repatriated from Germany, her longtime residence, to her Chilean homeland. Ingrid’s daughter, Paloma, arrives safely in Santiago to begin the process, but when an ash storm blanketing Chile diverts the plane carrying the corpse to Argentina, Paloma, Iquela, and Felipe decide to rent a hearse and cross the cordillera to fetch the coffin. Zerán’s indirect treatment of Pinochet and his impact may challenge those unfamiliar with Chilean history, but this allusive quality suits a novel focused on those who experience atrocity secondhand. This novel is vividly rooted in Chile, yet the quests at its heart—to witness and survive suffering, to put an intractable past to rest—are universally resonant.

Starred review from June 1, 2019
First novel by a Chilean literary scholar who serves up a centrifugal story of death, history, and mathematics. Felipe Arrabal, a young man living in Santiago, and his friend Iquela have an unusual ability: They can see the dead, legions of whom are to be found in what he describes as "the strangest of places: lying at bus stops, on curbs, in parks, hanging from bridges and traffic lights, floating down the Mapocho." The dead are everywhere, and Felipe uses "apocalyptic maths" to try to account for them all, millions on millions, their number added to dramatically by the murderous military government of Pinochet and company. Iquela's heart goes aflutter when she meets Paloma, an ever so cool young woman who has come to Santiago from Berlin; she smokes, has blonde hair, looks tough, and knows the ways of the world. Paloma is so mysterious that a cop wonders whether to bust her for smoking underage "or let her do as she pleased." Clearly Paloma does what she pleases most of the time, raised, like Iquela, in a home that has deep, hidden roots in the anti-Pinochet resistance movement. "We were so young," laments Iquela's mother, looking back on the day she met Paloma's mom, who, alas, has died--and now her body has gone missing somewhere on the other side of the Andes. She might be anywhere, Iquela observes: in an airplane hangar, in a morgue, back home in Berlin, or "locked inside the photograph hanging on the wall of my mother's dining room." Clueless, the three go on a winding journey in search of the wayward body, adding "an improvised inventory of corpses" to Felipe's endless calculations. The story is told matter-of-factly, with a few hints of magical realism layered in, especially as it draws to a close: They might be angels or Valkyries, perhaps ghosts themselves, but whatever they are, they're memorable companions on a strange trip. Thanatofiction at its best and a debut that leaves the reader wanting more.

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