... taut and propulsive ... [a] brilliant debut ... The English translation by Sophie Hughes, which appeared in 2018 in the U.K., is truly stunning, full of deft turns of phrase, and shines especially bright when unwinding Felipe’s melodic monologues ... an eerie and effective...plot ... As the road trip progresses, certain chapters narrated by Felipe grow almost nauseating—the risk (and perhaps the purpose) his frenzied prose—but the alternating narration serves its role quite well. Iquela’s descriptions of the trio’s journey are meditative and constructed with meticulous intent. They help anchor the plot and can also be surprisingly comedic. Paired with Felipe’s fugue-like voice, the exchange in perspective becomes mimetic of the fraught reciprocations between then and now, mother and daughter, the memories of parents and those of their children.
...intelligent and immersive novel, skilfully translated ... Zerán’s elegiac novel deals less in narrative than sensation, and the loss or lack thereof ... Though both surreal and captivating, the plot of this novel feels largely secondary to the cathartic experience of reading it ... The reader is repeatedly stalled in their attempts to build up a coherent narrative of the characters’ past ... The reader, too, is almost intoxicated, not by Paloma exactly but by this rhythmic fixation ... Zerán seamlessly alternates between the voices of Iquela and Felipe, highlighting the opposing and gendered ways they have reacted to the circumstances of their childhood ... The Remainder could be framed as a road-trip novel, but it is anything but expansive in its scope. Scenes take place almost exclusively in confined spaces ... There is no true resolution in The Remainder, but that does not diminish the work ... we leave feeling more aware of our limits, our past and our interior life.
Trabucco Zerán is one of several chillingly talented writers who are heirs to...late-20th-century Chilean trauma ... The Remainder is a book about what to do with inherited trauma—what good it might serve the next generation in terms of learning from previous atrocious horrors, and what paralysis it might trigger in terms of living in a world that’s materially different from the past and the muddled territory in between ... The Remainder is driven by immersion in visceral gratification as its characters flee the burdens of their lives. And while there is pleasure in this sort of running, there is fear in it, too.
You could call The Remainder a literary kaleidoscope: look at it one way and you see how the past lays a crippling hand on the generation that follows political catastrophe; shift the focus and you’re plunged into a darkly comic road trip ... Her spring-heeled prose moves lightly from lyrical to demotic, bawdy to elegiac. She brings the trio touchingly to life ... a soaring ecstasy that comes closer to anything I can recall to describing how it feels to fly like bird.
Felipe’s chapters have a hallucinatory quality: As he walks the streets of Santiago, the deaths of decades past merge with signs of present-day violence to create a haunting tapestry of death. Iquela’s narration is more restrained, but it also has impossibilities of its own ... In a novel where the past is constantly breaking the surface of the present, and where memory and language fail to do justice to the events before one’s face, there exists a high potential for the whole enterprise to collapse into chaos — especially with the reminder of their own mortality awaiting at the end of the road. The Remainder is a haunted novel, awash with sinister and elegiac moods. It stands as a testament to the way the past can unsettle us, and the way distant or vanished lives can be as present as the person next door.
In a notable translation by Sophie Hughes, Zerán’s lyricism and eye for detail shine on the page. The opening chapters are particularly gripping, documenting Iquela’s coming-of-age at a time when the regime is ending ... A preoccupation with language and translation, the way in which we interpret things, saturates the novel ... Zerán focuses on the present in a storyline that is original and macabre but ultimately underdeveloped ... The book’s problem lies with Felipe, whose story is told in alternating chapters and never reveals itself. Initially intriguing, and stylistically impressive as it spins a single sentence into a chapter, the character’s obsession with death and gore becomes repetitive in later sections. Far more interesting is the dynamic between Iquela and Paloma, recalling the disturbed female relationships in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye.
