INTERESTING STRUCTURE HERE. In first section of this four-section novel, the Chilean narrator recalls interaction he had with one of the neighbor families, especially one of the daughters, when he was about ten. The neighbor family is under some stress; the father is wanted by the Pinochet government and is living under an assumed identity.
In the third section, the narrator meets up with the daughter again about twenty years later, not having seen her in the interim. They have an affair, but it’s hard to tell how enduring it will turn out to be.
In the novel’s second and fourth sections, the narrator is a novelist—the author, indeed, of the first and third parts. However, he is stuck with the novel and his marriage has come apart.
We have reasons to think that the writer who narrates the second and fourth sections based the narrator of the first and third sections on himself. For instance, the novelist’s mother reads the same books and makes some of the same observations as the mother of the narrator in the novel-within-the-novel.
Does that mean that Eme (the ex-wife of sections 2 & 4) is based on Claudia (the neighbor girl of section 1 re-encountered years later in section 3)? And what would that mean?
I’m not sure. The novel does, however, seem to be about an inherited trauma—the generation that came after the Pinochet coup (Zambra was born two years after it happened) but whose lives grew up around the catastrophe their parents lived through, their lives shaped by a catastrophe they did not remember and would not even get an account of until they were adults.
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