Alejandro Zambra is a Chilean writer at the forefront of literature today. The appearance in 2006 of Bonsái, his first novel, was an event—“A bloodletting,” as Marcela Valdes called it. In 2007 he was one of the Hay Festival’s “39 under 39” list of the best young Latin American writers, and in 2010 he was featured in Granta’s Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists issue. He has written two more novels: La vida privada de los arboles (tr. The Private Lives of Trees, Open Letter), and Formas de volver a casa (tr. Ways of Going Home, FSG); his new collection of short stories, Mis documentos, will be out from Anagrama in early 2014.
All three of Alejandro’s novels have been translated into many languages, including English. The essay we feature today, though, is about a different kind of translation: that from book to film. In 2011 Bonsái was adapted for the screen by the Chilean director Cristián Jimenez, to wide acclaim.
The Novel I Lost
I didn’t want Bonsai to become a movie, I really wasn’t interested. I turned down one director, then another, and then also Cristián Jiménez. Soon he asked me again, and again I refused, but this time I asked him to let me see his work. And it so happened that Ilusiones ópticas, his first film, moved me in a way nothing had in a long time. I was captivated by his way of seeing things, his search, which I felt to be very different from my own. But it was also, on another level, very close, familiar. Then I gave up playing the stubborn writer and I felt proud that someone like him appreciated my book.
I trusted instinctively and almost immediately in Cristián, and I decided that, whatever happened, in no case would I be the typical writer who resents his novel’s adaptation. And so I decided that if I didn’t like the film, I would just keep quiet. But I had a good feeling about it. I thought, above all, about the final scene of Ilusiones ópticas, the marvelous Paola Lattus and Iván Álvarez de Araya forehead to forehead. I won’t give it away here, but to me that was one of the most risky and beautiful endings I’ve ever seen in a film (and on top of that, incredibly, it is a happy ending).
*
For Cristián, writing the script wasn’t easy. There were several times he felt himself foundering. Every once in a while we would get together to have lunch and talk about the novel, and my position was strange but fairly comfortable–I didn’t feel like I was artistically implicated, so to speak, in the film: it wasn’t my movie, I had no obligation, and moreover I was writing Ways of Going Home, which completely absorbed me. Cristián asked me questions no one else had asked, because he read Bonsai over and over again, savagely, affectionately. I remember most of all how one morning I opened the door for him and he said to me, by way of a greeting, like a policeman: “We need to talk about Emilia’s death.” And I really did feel a little guilty for having killed her.
*
My first contact with Jiménez took place mid-2008, a year after The Private Lives of Trees, my second novel, was published. And the afternoon we met up for the first time, in the big Olán restaurant on Seminario, I had just written a couple of pages I’d spent months searching for, and I was happy because I was starting to get close to what would end up being Ways of Going Home. I mention this because there is an important relationship between this novel and the film, which ultimately appeared almost at the same time; in fact, I went to the book launch in Santiago, the next day I took off for Barcelona, and a week later I was in Cannes for the premier of Bonsai.
There are some traces of this process in Ways of Going Home; for example, the mention of Buenos días, the film by Ozu, was one of the filmmakers Jiménez and I talked about—because sometimes we also met up to watch movies. By then we were a couple of friends who talked about anything, while he drank tea (like the Julio of his movie) and I drank coffee (like the Julio of my book). We never completely forgot, though, what it was that brought us together. From our conversations I culled small supplementary convictions about literary creation. As I watched the way Cristián tackled the material, I thought again about the specificity of literature, that classic question of structuralism: what is the literary, strictly speaking, in a novel or a poem—what is it that can’t be done by other means, in another language?
*
When Cristián sent me the first version of the script, I started out reading it in a basically sportive state of mind, but the experience affected me in a way that was unexpected and radical. It’s difficult for me to express this idea: I had known that the novel would become something else, another very different, foreign work, and I really did want that. But as I read the script for the first time, even though I thought it was good and I recognized some marvelous solutions in it, I felt like my novel had been violated or erased, like the book was not going to exist anymore.
That afternoon, almost without realizing it, I went out for a walk, and I headed toward the house where I was living when I wrote Bonsai, and I smoked several cigarettes while I looked at the façade. In Ways of Going Home, the protagonist does something very similar, but now I’m unsure of the timing and I don’t know if I wrote that scene before or after the afternoon when, to put it conventionally, I went through mourning.
I like to think that when we publish books, they are like children leaving home: we wish them well, but there is little or nothing we can do for them. And we are much more interested in the book we’re writing now, the one we are raising now. That afternoon, sitting on the curb, I thought that from then on my novel would live very far away, and that maybe it was on its way to becoming one of those ungrateful children who never call home.
*
What came next was simply time. Between the novel and the film there are differences of every sort, and some of them will be divisive. I’m glad for that. Of course, if I had made the movie, it would be very different: it would be set entirely in Santiago, it would have different music, a different rhythm, a different mood: everything would be different. But I don’t make movies. And, in another sense, I feel very close to what Cristián saw in my book. It’s a privilege, no doubt about it, for someone to read your book in such depth, and to crystallize their own, autonomous reading of it.
Later I found out that Trinidad González, an actress I like a lot, would be in the movie, and that the main character would be played by Diego Noguera, which made me happy because I had just seen him in Turistas, by Alicia Scherson. And then I spent four months in Mexico City, and though I didn’t know it, that time coincided with the filming; I was very sorry about that, since I would have loved to crash the film shoots and filter a little more into that world.
*
When Bonsai was published, in February of 2006, some writers reacted irately toward the novel, arguing that it was not a novel, it was a long story, a nouvelle. Defining the novel as a genre is impossible, but in any case the idea persists that it is a long story, two hundred pages or more (and the longer it is the better, the more a novel it will be). I hadn’t wanted, strictly speaking, to write a novel, but rather a kind of simulacrum or summary of a novel: the same way that a bonsai is and isn’t a tree, I wanted a book that was and wasn’t a novel. Aside from that, if Bonsai had been published along with another story, people would have called it a long story, and no one would have accepted it as a novel. But I didn’t want to publish Bonsai accompanied by some other story. For me it was, a book, a single unit. That was the project. I even thought at one point of adding a subtitle: A Toy Novel. Cristián Jiménez’s Bonsai, on the other hand, is a movie, and not a short film.
*
I remember an essay in which Susan Sontag says that a film that is an hour and a half long is equivalent to a short story and not a novel, and that this is the great mistake of adaptations, since filmmakers find themselves obliged to over-simplify. This was also my biggest fear, which is why I hadn’t accepted the previous offers: I didn’t want them to simplify the book in any way. I didn’t want, especially, for the movie to shout what is whispered in the novel. Cristián felt the same way. In an initial meeting I asked him if he thought the novel seemed “filmable”, and he replied that no, it didn’t at all. That was precisely why he was interested in adapting it.
It’s very strange for the novel to be shorter than the movie. You can read Bonsai in less than an hour, and the movie lasts ninety minutes. And although in this novel the characters pretend to have read a book, I like to think that, cramming for an impending test, in this case some school kid will choose to read the novel.
*
I saw the film at Cannes amid a general sense of nervousness, and I still can’t decipher what I felt then. The screen was in some way a mirror, because many of the phrases those characters said were ones I had written or lived. And even so it wasn’t mine, it belonged to Cristián and to the actors and the almost unbelievable number of people it takes to make a movie. I felt a long mixture of happiness and serenity. And the certainty that I had lost that story: that if it belongs to me now, it is in a new and profoundly collective way. And that, without a doubt, is beautiful.
April, 2012
(This piece is excerpted from No leer, Alejandro Zambra’s book of collected essays.)
Read more of Alejandro’s work: “The Cyclops,” translated by Elizabeth Fisherkeller, appeared in Asymptote‘s July 2012 issue.