Review: My Documents

My Documents by Alejandro Zambra
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I love Zambra. I feel like I've started a review with this before. I love Zambra and the way he uses words. He pulls a magic trick, it feels as if his word are like cards that have been dropped onto the floor, haphazard and careless. Yet, you look closer, and it is clear that he is a deliberate and cautious writer, the planned carelessness, the constructed breeze, everything right where it belongs.

My Documents is an interesting collection of short stories. It is haunting, especially towards the end where the stories introduce some jarring themes (including rape). It is a conflicting set of stories, the characters are complicated, their motivations sometimes obscured just enough to keep them strangers. There are compulsions on display, so human and so terrifying and so bizarre but so real nonetheless.

It lacks the depth of some of his other work, but I love Zambra's language and his ability to write pieces that feel so much a part of this world, inexplicable but familiar.

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