Representations of Life

by

Nicki Leone

When I was in high school a teacher had us read a short story by Kurt Vonnegut called “Who Am I This Time?” It is an ironic and funny little tale of Harry Nash, a painfully shy young man who can’t seem to express himself at all, until he happens to land the part of Stanley Kowalski in the town’s amateur theater production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Suddenly, what he can’t say as Harry, he has no trouble saying as Stanley, especially when he is saying it to Helene Shaw, who is playing Stella in the production. The two fall in love on stage, and their passion for each other is incandescent—on stage. Harry and Helene are the most themselves when they are playing other people. It ends with Harry proposing marriage (via Oscar Wilde) and the two striding hand and hand into a future built of an endless series of theatrical roles.

The story is clever and has lots of things to say about the intersection between art and life, between who we are and who we pretend to be, between “real” and “staged.” If art illuminates life, if life is at the foundation of art, then there must be some strange interstitial space where the two are uncomfortably mixed and the distinction is not quite clear. Is the love between Harry and Helene real if it only works when they are being Stanley and Stella? 

My high school English teacher, however, wasn’t really interested in the literary implications and stylistic twists of a story about characters who had to become characters in order to be “real.” Instead, he just asked us “Do you think their relationship will work?” Most of the class—cynical youths, all—said no, not a chance. What Harry and Helene had wasn’t “real.” They couldn't forever be pretending to be other people. But I, who at the age of fifteen had absolutely no concept of what it meant to be in love but understood completely what it was like to live through books, said why not? They would never run out of plays to act in.

I was reminded of Harry and Helene when I was reading Bonsai, an intense little novel by the up-and-coming Chilean writer Alejandro  Zambra. Zambra is sometimes regarded as a kind of “anti-Roberto Bolano,” (the current Chilean literary star in this country; too bad it happened after he was dead), Zambra's style is clean and minimalist against Bolano’s expansiveness and epic scope. Bolano enjoyed playing with the form of the novel, experimenting with narrative structure.  Zambra's work, uh, also experiments with narrative structure and the form of the novel. He’s just not quite as nice about it. Bolano's work is filled with compassion. Zambra, not so much. At least not so much in this novel.

Bonsai is about a love affair between a young man and woman, Julio and Emilia. They meet as students studying for an exam, and like university students everywhere and in every era, it eventually occurs to them that it would be more fun to have sex than study. They fail the exam—twice—but the sex leads to talking which leads naturally to literature, which is what they both happen to be studying. They lie to each other, each pretending to the other they have actually read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. And they read to each other every night—literature being excellent foreplay. Like all young lovers, they believe they must like the same things to be in love, so they learn to read and to like the same books. Their romance becomes a kind of literary construct they add to each night, with each new author they bring to bed with them. It’s as if, when they read a story together, they are also writing their own. The difference between what is “fiction” and what is “real” becomes, well, insignificant.

But unlike Harry and Helene, who can be comfortably envisioned riding off into a sunset of endless stage-romances, Julio and Emilia are serious, sullen university students and not inclined to read the sort of books that have happy endings. Their relationship begins to founder after they read a story called “Tantalia,” of a couple who decides to buy a plant as a symbol of their love. But then they suddenly realize that if the plant dies, so may their relationship—such is the nature of symbols—so they hide the plant among hundreds of other identical plants. Only to despair, for now they will never be able to find their plant again.

It was an unfortunate choice of reading material for two young people inclined to see Truth, with a capital T, in the books they read to each other, and who did not distinguish, greatly, between what is literature and what is life. They sense the flaw in their construct, but they persist, ignoring the dangers, for awhile longer, until at last the relationship crumbles under the weight of Marcel Proust. Fatally, they pick up In Search of Lost Time, the book they have both pretended to have read, and decide to read to each other now, although to do so they must each work to sound like they are re-reading. They make it to page 372, in Swann's Way, to thispoint: “Knowledge of a thing cannot impede it; but at least we have the things we discover, if not in our hands, at least in thought, and there they are at our disposal, which inspires us to the illusory hope of enjoying a kind of dominion over them.”

At which point they stop. They put down Proust and their privately held fantasies of actually finishing In Search of Lost Time, and they lose their dominion over the illusion. Not long after Emilia leaves Julio. Much later, she commits suicide, although Julio doesn't know this. Julio tries again to write his life into existence. He interviews for a job transcribing the work of a famous novelist and although he doesn’t get the job, he acts as though he has: telling friends and neighbors of his conversations and meetings with this famous writer, discussing the novel he is in the process of transcribing. Julio isn’t lying, exactly, just telling a story. He is inventing life. Writing it. Indeed, he is so taken up with writing this life into existence that he not only perpetuates the fiction he is transcribing a great writer's novel, he also writes the novel he is supposed to be transcribing. (Julio tells his friends that the writer has titled it Bonsai).

It’s hopeless, of course. When the writer’s book is eventually published it is nothing like the book Julio has been inventing for him. Once again, he has lost dominion over the illusion. He tries again, not by writing, but by trying to actually grow a bonsai—a process he seems to equate with writing, this careful, deliberate creation of a representation of life. And in this, at last, he succeeds, although it is of no help or use when he discovers, long after the fact, that Emilia is dead. One of Julio’s bonsai manuals advises for a bonsai, the pot is as important as the plant.  That “. . . once outside its flowerpot, the tree ceases to be a bonsai.” Julio's life, it seems, has been a long series of falling out of flowerpots. That interstitial space between art and life that became a refuge for Vonnegut's Harry and Helene is a kind of no-man’s land for Zambra's characters. It is a place from which Julio seems forever being exiled.

Bonsai contains a lot of the kind of literary experimentalism and fun-and-games that tend to delight critics. The story is told backwards. The characters are introduced as characters. “The rest,” the author writes, “is literature.” And I have no doubt that you could while away an entire afternoon examining the careful construction of what is actually quite a short piece of fiction, and picking it apart to see how it was made. But in the end, the beauty of a bonsai is in its perfectly-realized entirety, not in how it was grown. And so it is with this story, which feels sad, feels exquisite, and feels, like a bonsai, like a rather miraculous and perfect miniature representation of a life.

Books mentioned in this column:
Bonsai by Alejandro  Zambra (Melville House, 2008)
“Who Am I This Time?”, from Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Delta, 1998)
A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams (Signet, 1986)
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (Modern Library, 1998)
“Tantalia” by Macedonio Fernandez, The Book of Fantasy, edited by Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Silvina Ocampo (Carroll & Graf, 1990)



Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.