...heartfelt ... translated with sleight of hand from Spanish by Megan McDowell ... Without a doubt, it is his best work yet, generously infused with nostalgic tenderness, original humor, and Zambraesque storytelling vitality. Only a writer like Zambra—whose love for literature, insight into human vulnerability, and understanding of tumultuous history were expansively illustrated in his previous works—could have written Chilean Poet ... The intersection of familial and literary lives is infused with heartrending drama ... the novel is at once an emotionally resonant story about human relationship, and the procedural depiction of writing a novel about Chilean poets ... Regardless, both Zambra’s straightforward prose and his experimental poems all read naturally, thanks to McDowell’s astute translation.

[A] brilliant poetical novel ... A topsy-turvy blend of bildungsroman and roman à clef, Poeta chileno ...amends the poetics of contemporary 'autobiographictions,' verifying the need to renovate their validity. Zambra does so by brilliantly coaxing his readers in each of the novel’s four parts to believe his frequently hilarious tales ... a novelistic epigone but primarily a charming, very rare, and disconcerting tribute to the poet’s vocation; a poignant settling of scores.

There is a gentle joke in the title of Alejandro Zambra’s Chilean Poet that leads readers to expect some kind of highbrow Künstlerroman while actually delivering a novel of domesticity filled with prosaic records of daily life. This is partly because, as Mr. Zambra teases, Chile has so many damn poets that the calling has lost its mystique and become a national industry. But the greater meaning has to do with the difficult poetic potentiality for inspiration and transcendence, which this splendid book finds in family relationships as much as in artistic creation ... moves deftly among different points of view, arriving at Vicente’s maturation—inevitably, he too becomes a moody wannabe poet. His complicated reunion with Gonzalo is one of the best endings to a novel that I have read in years, a scene of beautiful emotional improvisation.

Zambra’s novel, the playfully titled Chilean Poet is a lighthearted study of the contemporary Chilean literary scene as its members try to come out from under the shadow of these figures while also clinging to their legacy ... How much you enjoy Chilean Poet will depend on the amount of patience you have for the trend of writer-protagonists, a symptom of the autofictional turn. The stream of poets, journalists and literary types in the novel had me wishing the veterinarian Vicente’s cat is taken to had a bigger story arc. Chilean Poet is most compelling when it situates the minor dramas of the Latin American literati within the broader politics of how that identity has been constructed in the first place ... Chilean Poet treats the thorny topic of collective identity not as tragedy, but as a familial comedy. Its laughs are forged across languages, in sibling-esque back-and-forth, so mutually constituted by both English and Spanish that one happily loses track of any original.

... a heartwarming comedy about parenthood and poetry ... Gonzalo navigates the tribulations of family life with a certain whimsical grace ... The satire is affectionate. Zambra is no cynic; on the contrary, his depiction of the fledgling poet is unabashedly romantic — evoking, with wistful sincerity, the zeal of that first flush of intellectual discovery ... told in an elegantly simple third-person narration that is well served by Megan McDowell’s clean and crisp translation from the Spanish ... Writing fiction about parenthood can be tricky — it’s all too easy to lapse into mawkishness. Chilean Poet is sentimental but not saccharine, retaining just enough ironic distance to militate against tweeness. Crucially, Zambra never lays it on too thick ... deft, poignant and emotionally acute.

Toward its beginning the novel is heavy on twee machismo that isn’t offensive so much as pesky, and much more prevalent in Zambra’s early novels ... The narration, again consistent with much of Zambra’s previous fiction, features a cheeky authorial voice who occasionally interrupts the close third to make metafictional cracks ... Then there are those signature Zambra sentences, those reckless, rambling sentences that proceed like sleepwalkers traversing the same crosswalk, heedless of traffic lights ... As for Zambra’s realization of character: nobody is ever not in the mood for sex. Nobody does anything at a reasonable hour if they can help it. Often the women possess a sort of mystical introspective wisdom. The men are not wise, but love fiercely, as does everyone—the women, the children—unless they are a fascist, a fascist schoolteacher, or a deadbeat dad. There is something contrived but comforting, too, about a world where every passion is dispatched at night and every true thought is coupled with a false one—a reading and writing world, and an artistic one regardless of whether its characters make art ... Though Zambra’s latest dwells primarily in youth (or maybe it’s even fair to say in his younger novels), it does in many strange and enthralling ways mature as one reads it. Time almost always moves forward—two generations get their moment in the sun, governments transition—but more to the point, the novel’s occasionally self-referential author-voice changes, becomes less tortured and vain, more attentive and funny as the pages turn. This voice never remarks naively upon its own progress or belittles the journey at its end, but changes constantly, subtly, over time and line by line, through processes of repetition ... Reading Chilean Poet, one arrives at the sense that everything there is to say about literary lives has already been said, but that isn’t at all a bad thing.

Zambra abandons his miniatures, mostly leaves behind his meta-awareness, varies point-of-view, improvises plotlines more than ever before, and proves his talent in the held-with-two-hands novel ... this novel isn’t about poetry. It isn’t packed with poems or theories of poems. Instead, it is about the promise of poetry: the appeal poetry holds as a domain of magic, where one can dwell with diverse solitudes and where reality merges with fantasies and dreams ... In life, love passes through disappointment, rejection, misunderstanding, bad timing, accident, circumstance, and tribulation. This is what Chilean Poet captures so honestly: the course and damages of love. And Zambra’s novels remain clever and poetic, never too serious, always affirming. This quality could be described as warmth, but I will call it inclusivity: Zambra’s novels will always accept us. They will not be bitter and they will not allow us to writhe in anguish. They will show us the pain of maturation and the pain of relationships, but they will lead us through these passages gently, with humor and compassion. One could call this unrealistic; we break others and people break us without warning or consideration. But from the distance of the future, where Zambra’s narrators stand, you can see more of each event, as if you were standing back to admire a fresco. From that distance, you can admire and pity our human trials and mistrials ... These novels dangerously approach the sentimental—with their humor and tenderness, with their one-liners about reality, home, literature, and love. Somehow they never cross it. I don’t know whether it is because the actions approximate the strange turns of life or because Zambra writes in an earnest voice. Or because he believes his wise lines—believes them so strongly you must accept them on the page ... Zambra ends novels better than anyone alive, and the ending to Chilean Poet is one of the most memorable a reader can experience.

Alejandro Zambra is a star in the constellation of poesy-interested prose writers ... Chilean Poet focuses on multiple generations of bards ... At its best, the book is self-aware, smattered with metafictional intrusions whose playfulness is sadly passé in today’s literature ... At its worst—well, Zambra writes about Brooklyn ... Thankfully, such hackneyed depictions of poor-by-choice bohemia don’t take up much real estate, and one of the novel’s most successful sections finds Pru visiting Chilean poets both fictional and real ... There’s believable lesbian romance in Chilean Poet, yet gay men cruise along the narrative’s borders like stereotypes of desperate queens, sinking Chilean Poet from being uncharacteristically uneven to becoming dastardly ... It’s a shame, since Zambra’s self-awareness redeems sections that would drown capital-R realist prose ... Vicente’s interiority...injects the book with rejuvenating insights, clueing us in to the possibility that Gonzalo’s boring narration was a deliberate reflection of his lackluster verse ... One passage of Chilean Poet shines particularly bright with this profound core, sparkling unlike the myriad moments when Zambra’s sensibility fails his characters ... I am not a Chilean critic, but I am a gay critic, and we write criticism about homophobic novels like Chilean Poet while keeping them at arm’s length, especially when, as is the case with clever, capable Zambra, the author should know better.

Since Bonsai, each of Zambra’s subsequent novellas...has been more confident than the last, its voice further refined (his regular translator Megan McDowell has mastered the predominant tone of droll melancholy right along with him) ... Chilean Poet returns to Bonsai’s theme of a young writer’s awakening, but attains its depth by doubling the portrait and tracing both characters through time ... There’s slack in this section of the novel, with the affection it indulges on its motley versifiers. But it also invokes a national theme, justifying the title ... For Zambra’s characters, a literary lineage is easier to cling to than a real one. All too often, their parents are tainted by the not-so-good things about Chile, particularly their roles as victims or beneficiaries or bystanders during Pinochet’s dictatorship.

While reading Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra, you are likely to make strange noises. Gasps of astonishment, anxious finger-tapping, laughter when seeing a super-specific moment from your past characterized in unvarnished terms ... Translator Megan McDowell’s ability to capture the novel’s Chilenismos beyond the usual linguistic chasms between English and Spanish is a remarkable achievement ... In Chilean Poet, Zambra strikes a perfect balance of self-aware yet sincere. He reaches the sublime through descriptions of everyday routine. He never takes himself too seriously while acknowledging the gravity of introducing a child to the world in all its glorious contradictions.

Zambra uses Pru’s reporting to create a collective portrait of artistic adulthood. But only through Vicente does Chilean Poet become truly communal in its outlook ... It is a testament to Zambra’s skill that I can so readily imagine the continuation of Vicente’s life. It is also a testament to Chilean Poet’s hopefulness, which, while cautious, runs so deep that the book seems almost to have predicted Boric’s victory. Boric campaigned on a progressive vision of Chile’s future, one that would be hospitable to even the most marginalized of the poets Pru interviews. That would make sense, really. As Zambra points out in 'Experiencia,' Boric—a man committed to the collective good, and a serious reader of poetry, if nothing else—is a Chilean poet too.

a tour de force of language in which words feel like the wagons of a train that thrusts forward at the speed of life, straight or on a curve, toward a simple thought made beautifully complex by the act of taking the meaning behind those rhythmically meandering words, breaking them down so that we see what characters are doing, but also everything going through their minds as they do. This is a feat, this painting of a human being’s deeply three-dimensional life—which could easily have turned out a nightmare, but here, doesn’t—and done so well, it’s pleasurable, life’s rhythms reconstructed and synced to the speed of memory ... The novel itself unfolds like a love letter much like the one the initial protagonist (the novel encompasses generations, as well as unorthodox familial combinations) sends his girlfriend Carla after they break up. A love letter about things not love, but related to love, impossible without love. Like fatherhood, and poetry, and even just the human ability to envision a future intertwined with another’s ... a deeply charming story full of complex insights delivered from a simple, humanistic point of view told thoroughly, often breaking the 'fourth wall' to speak directly, with love for the reader, and for the story being told.

... another zestful translation by McDowell ... Zambra’s portrayal of the society of Chilean poets is predominantly comic...Other highlights include a rowdy and pugnacious literary party and an amusingly worshipful pilgrimage taken by the protagonist, Vicente (our titular hero), to visit the grandfather of Chilean poetry, a ninety-nine-year-old Nicanor Parra ... This fifty-page final section is particularly moving as it emerges tentatively from the emotional confines of an overwhelmingly male-dominated society ... Zambra’s conclusion is perfectly judged ... The novelist, putatively in charge, has simply allowed the poet a temporary victory. Zambra the poet and Zambra the novelist are beautifully poised. Or you could say they are one and the same.

A unique and personal novel about what it means to be part of a family ... The relationships in the novel are touching, often frustrating, and always authentic. Zambra isn’t afraid to switch from graphic sex scenes to hilarious ruminations on poetry anthologies or into multiple characters’ points of view, all in a few pages ... A playful, discursive novel about families, relationships, poetry, and how easily all three can come together or fall apart.

The painstaking details and plodding pace can make this a slog, but there’s no questioning Zambra’s deep affection for writers grasping at love. The author always shows a great deal of heart, but it comes through best in his shorter work.

... has everything but also very little to do with poetry ... In his trademark lyrical style, Alejandro Zambra, a poet himself, pens this tribute to the unique milieu of Chile's literary circle, in which poets are treated like national heroes and the opinions of one poet about another spark fights ... In its toggling between perspectives and willingness to stretch out and examine seemingly trivial interactions, Zambra's writing is reminiscent of that of Czech writer Milan Kundera, who also makes abundant references to poetry ... Despite its subject matter, Zambra's writing is never insular, nor are his poet characters overly saccharine. The poet-editors, poet-journalists, poet-critics and poet-booksellers that he describes are both ridiculous and heroic ... Nor does he shy away from the limits of poetry. Beyond its capacity to express, soothe and entertain, the language of poetry is also deflection, in many ways hindering the development of real relationships between characters who would do better talking about how they feel in simpler terms.

While reading Alejandro Zambra’s Chilean Poet, I wondered if a picaresque can stand still. The author, himself an established poet, has created in his new novel a world full of emotional and intellectual adventures that never wanders far from Santiago, his native city ... Pru is funny and engaging, and her relationship with the much younger Vicente is charming and believable. However, that relationship recedes into the background as the novel becomes a love letter to the country’s poets. Through Pru’s interviews, we get portraits of a dozen or more poets, many of them witty, fierce, and independent. Zambra satirizes the competitive backbiting and petty rivalries within the poetry community, but his depictions are lovingly done, and one imagines a cameo in the novel will give the real-life poets bragging rights for years ... We see in these writers a population committed to a somewhat knee-jerk leftism, with everyone spouting ritualistic invectives against capitalism and fascism. But it’s also clear that many of them suffered tremendously under the brutal Pinochet dictatorship, which is referred to frequently but never discussed in detail ... Despite the close attention to these relationships, and the arc of Gonzalo and Vicente’s relationship in particular, the plot sometimes wanders. Long digressions to recount sexual exploits and embarrassing bowel movements feel like, well, digressions. But the prose is always delightful: taut and funny and full of moments that capture emotions with vivid honesty ... Credit for much of that emotional connection must go to Megan McDowell, an accomplished translator shortlisted several times for the Booker Prize. While laughing out loud at parts of this novel, I could see why she is so esteemed ... an irresistible richness and the feel of an adventure — without once leaving the neighborhood.

... the pursuit of a poetic life becomes the vehicle for a wry and poignant story of masculine self-discovery, and the search for a family to put a solid frame around your lines ... Given its title, you might expect from Chilean Poet a highly sophisticated homage to the literary acrobatics of Zambra’s legendary compatriot, Roberto Bolaño. In the event, much of the first half more closely resembles a sharp-eyed, warm-hearted modern-family romance in the vein of a David Nicholls or Nick Hornby from the Southern Cone. Maybe it’s none the worse for that ... Cue a generous dose of barbed but merry literary satire, in which Zambra indulges himself – although most readers will forgive him. It almost takes us into Martin Amis territory via the poets’ raucous parties and bubbling feuds ... Megan McDowell, Zambra’s regular translator, shifts with unobtrusive virtuosity between the fluid vernacular of daily life and the heightened or mysterious idiom where – so these characters hope – the elusive truths of poetry unfold. When, at the close, Gonzalo and Vicente bar-hop while trading poems, we almost approach a Santiago version of the wavering rapport between Bloom and Stephen Dedalus that propels Joyce’s Ulysses. From here to paternity is both no distance – and an unbridgeable chasm. Still, both men have the 'enveloping and messy rhythm' of their friendship and their verses, ;an inconstant music with images that are tentative, bold, turbulent, and warm' – rather like the texture of this genial, shrewd and tender novel.

What to say about a novel that is humorous, charming, excellently written, and yet, at the turning of its final page, inspires you to merely shrug and think, Well, that was alright, that was a novel? What to write about a new work that does not entirely excite or thrill, from one of the most exciting and thrilling writers of the last ten, twenty years? ... I wish I had gotcha answers to the above. But I don’t. I feel bewildered by this novel because even now, having scoured through it twice with numerous insightful ticks in the margins, it is as if I haven’t read it. ... reading this novel felt a lot like watching a humdrum nil-nil between two Premier League teams. Yes, there were flashes of enviable quality because there were twenty-two top level professional players on the pitch, yes there was running around and lush green grass and some sturdy defending to admire, but can you remember anything substantial from those ninety minutes, anything worthwhile, and what freak cares about a well-oiled defence? ... Zambra is the rare thing: a writer who writes incessantly and tenderly about writers and writing and books but is not annoying. Adjectives I would use to describe Zambra’s work include: sly, inventive, cheeky, mischievous, funny, intelligent, contemporary. He gets away with sentences that no one else can ... And he is capable of leaving you weepy and introspective about nostalgia—rather than simply tickled by the piling up of time or the fact that nobody uses an iPod or that your living room is no longer home to the blocky desktop computer that made sounds like the ones you once thought robots would make. He is irreverent yet always makes you care. His prose is casual and devastatingly precise and riddled with off-centre similes that feel completely right. Many of these undoubted strengths are evident in Chilean Poet—bar perhaps the usual degree of inventiveness ... The novel is really funny. Zambra is witty and the comedy is never directed at characters: it arises naturally from them and their peculiarities. Additionally, the central family dynamic is so believable and heartfelt ... Line by line, reading Zambra is a supreme pleasure. His sentences are just great: the prose is supple, and his tone is laidback yet underpinned by real emotional intelligence and plain old boring intelligence. He can make complex situations and feelings read very simply and succinctly ... But despite these joys, so much of this book left me feeling miffed, or, like a father, earnestly disappointed. Zambra’s usual inventiveness, his rascal-like trickery, is present here, mostly through its omniscient narrator: an all-seeing but not all-powerful Author who intermittently butts in to break the fourth wall and add their own guesses and suggestions, muddling with the reader’s expectation of fiction as a solid form ... I wish the omniscient narration was more consistent, and I wish it was made to feel more important to the novel as a whole ... Zambra’s engagement with politics doesn’t amount to much beyond a few stray lines, some references to free third-level education, and, most prominently, a side character in the final section who is hired to help Gonzalo move house ... It’s as if Zambra wasn’t too interested in the idea of closely tracking a political upheaval, or that he lost interest in it halfway ... ’d wager many readers will love it. But I think you should be harsh on the work of a writer, an artist, if you believe they are great, and know they can do better.

... meanders along -- agreeably enough across its stretches, with the various scenes-from-lives, neatly sketching, variously, Gonzalo, Vicente, and Pru at different stages in their lives ... The poetry-background is nicely handled, helped by the fact that neither Gonzalo not Vicente is really much of a poet at any point here ... It all makes for an agreeable, easy-going read -- though much of it can seem much more surface than depth. Zambra does convey some sense of the emotions at play here, and one welcomes that he doesn't get too sentimental, but there's also an oddly distanced feel to much of it (which the leaps in time across the novel, leaving so much absent space, amplify). Chilean Poet is an appealing story, even if it feels Zambra never commits quite enough to one character or another -- while also never quite making a full ensemble-piece out of it. It's an enjoyable ride, if not entirely satisfying.

... a puzzling addition to his oeuvre. One reads its nearly four hundred pages in a state of torpor. Gone is the compressed insinuation of the earlier works. Instead, we’re given something like the easy, nebulous sentiment of a romantic comedy ... It’s all somehow risibly cinematic, rife with quirk and melancholy, as if Noah Baumbach started reading a lot of Juan Emar, say, or Wes Anderson got really into Nueva Ola. I longed constantly for what Adam Thirlwell has referred to as Zambra’s ‘experiments with brevity’. The novel commits the gravest of literary sins, and one I’d never expect from such an accomplished miniaturist: interminability ... It is here ­– in the barely glimpsed linkages between art, obsession and annihilation – that the Bolañoesque becomes most fully legible. It is also precisely what is missing from the smooth and neutered Chilean Poet ... is eminently readable in Megan McDowell’s clean translation. I imagine it will make many year-end lists, with its serio-comic briskness, its ostentatious, Woody Allen-like references to Kandinsky and Rothko, its 90s nostalgia (Double Dragon! Winona Ryder!), its charming story of intergenerational divide, and its vaguely mystical invocation of poets, whom some of us still believe to be wonderful and necessary, a species of holy fool. What, then, is it missing? Call it friction. The novel moves with the greased, serial and ultimately wasteful momentum of a Netflix series. It has the feeling of something likewise padded out, as if it were striving to meet a requirement, an insidious sensation in that this generally signals one’s proximity to ‘content’. Zambra’s marvellous feats of compression squeezed such longueurs from his previous fictions. Will the glancing miniaturist return? One hopes so. Sometimes less is a great deal more.

These funny, spirited, and self-effacing interlocutions are some of the most enjoyable parts of the novel; one can tell Zambra would defend to the death the very thing he lampoons. Fittingly, the novel also quotes many Chilean poems ... Perhaps Zambra’s writing process is not easy, but his fiction reads as if it was simply plucked from his mind and put on the paper, wholesale—in a good way. Effortless storytelling, in other words, abounds, and nothing is forced, nothing is contrived, as the events unfold. Only a certain kind of genius makes such a thing look easy, and it’s obvious that Zambra has it. The smoothness of the English is also a testament to McDowell’s translation; Zambra’s sentences are fluid and loose ... There is so much delight in Chilean Poet, and even more love.