These elements and the tone of the novel remind one of Roberto Bolaño, especially the short stories in Last Evenings on Earth, reading simultaneously as hyperreal and surreal, somber and yet light, highly involved and yet detached. The “as if”s seem to point to the intersections of reality and speculations of that reality, the concrete and the not-so-concrete. The narrative’s attention to “eyes” and “voice” speaks to how one bears witness and offers testimonies. Intellectuals, exiles, decedents, weirdos, the characters each engage with the past in their own way, with their own obsessions: mathematics, language, bodies. They have to retrace and bury Paloma’s mother, whose corpse has been lost on its way from Germany to Santiago, due to bad weather conditions, or more specifically ash rain, right on the other side of the border in Argentina. Now they are off to a new adventure together, a road trip, to help Paloma, another person appearing out of their shared past. Zerán introduces us to two “I”s, Iquela and Felipe, whose lives have been interwoven since childhood. The Beginning of Our Quest for Your Mother’s Missing BodyĪlia Trabucco Zerán’s The Remainder, translated by Sophie Hughes, a winner of the 2018 PEN Translates Award and shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, is a fresh look at a past that still haunts Chile.
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