Shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize
Kirkus Best Fiction of 2019
Kirkus Best Fiction in Translation of 2019
“A lyrical evocation of Chile’s lost generation, trying ever more desperately to escape their parents’ political shadow.” —Man Booker International Judges
"This novel is vividly rooted in Chile, yet the quests at its heart—to witness and survive suffering, to put an intractable past to rest—are universally resonant." —Publisher's Weekly, *STARRED REVIEW*
“A centrifugal story of death, history, and mathematics . . . a debut that leaves the reader wanting more.” —Kirkus
“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 with a hungover trio in an empty hearse chasing a lost coffin across the Andes cordillera.” —The Spectator
“While writers such as Pedro Lemebel and José Donoso have explored the regime’s impact on those who lived through it, Zerán is concerned with the next generation. Felipe, Iquela and Paloma are the children of ex-militants, attempting to “unremember” the past in Chile’s haunted capital, Santiago.” —TIME
“The second-generation trauma narrative . . . gets a Chilean spin in Zerán’s intense novel of interior monologues, which is Faulknerian in themes, structure, and style.” —Vulture
“A mesmerizing, roaming look at intergenerational trauma, told in a specific and surreal style that shimmers and shifts on the page and in the mind.” —Nylon
“Truly stunning, full of deft turns of phrase . . . shines especially bright when unwinding Felipe’s melodic monologues.” —Los Angeles Times
“Deeply compelling.” —The Guardian
“A haunted novel, awash with sinister and elegiac moods. It stands as a testament to the way the past can unsettle us.” —Star Tribune
“Neither the characters nor the narrative ever deal directly with the historic events themselves, but rather with the fallout – the photographs, vocabulary, places and people left behind as remnants. 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 Times Literary Supplement
“Trabucco Zerán urges readers to value subtext just as much as the ‘official’ narrative . . . a smart, vivid, and richly layered story.” —The Adroit Journal
“Alia Trabucco Zerán’s writing is gorgeous: she captures the courage, vulnerability, and suffering of her characters beautifully.” —Book Riot
“Intense and haunting, The Remainder is a startling reckoning with the history of violence.” —Book Riot
“This is a powerful debut.” —Ms. Magazine
“The Remainder controls a remarkable range of registers (it is, by turns, lyrical, elegiac, sensual, funny, tragic). The author, like her characters, is obsessed with words, those ‘cracks in language’ that house our particular ways of understanding things. This novel is sure to endure.” —Edmundo Paz Soldán
“A perfect companion book to last year’s Empty Set, another sparse and brilliant Latin American novel with an experimental structure from the same publisher.” —Chicago Tribune
“Both a road trip and a countdown . . . fast-paced and gripping.” —Librairie Drawn & Quarterly
“A powerful, impressive novel, dotted with scenes that are as unique as they are unforgettable.” —Lina Meruane“A fundamental book about what it means to mourn the past, about the remainders of a history that refuses to be forgotten. This is the debut we all wish we had written. A spirited, brave, urgent book, capable of weaving the political and the poetic.” —Carlos Fonseca“The Remainder redefines the political novel. . . . The voices in The Remainder are some of the most powerful to have come out of Latin America in the last year.” —Bárbara Pérez, “Granta en Español, 5 years later,” Instrucciones de Uso “A Chilean road trip reveals new ways to think about historical memory.” —Alba Lara, Iowa Literaria
“The sharpest, most incisive reprieve from novels dealing with the dictatorship by writers like Bolaño, Marín, Cerda y Varas.” —Rodrigo Pinto, El Mercurio “One of the best publications of 2015.” —Patricia Espinosa, Las Últimas Noticias
“Like all of Sophie’s works, the translation is superb. . . . Her translations feel essential but not labored over. Passionate readers of translated works know the confidence that comes with seeing a familiar name as the translator; Sophie is one of those.&rdquo —Mark Haber
“Zerán’s formidable command of two distinct styles throughout the novel (translated beautifully by Sophie Hughes), her ability to plumb the depths of generational trauma and her ability to engage with and deconstruct the concept of collective memory propels The Remainder to the status of masterpiece.&rdquo —Paperback Paris
★ 2019-05-13
First novel by a Chilean literary scholar who serves up a centrifugal story of death, history, and mathematics.
Felipe Arrabal, a young man living in Santiago, and his friend Iquela have an unusual ability: They can see the dead, legions of whom are to be found in what he describes as "the strangest of places: lying at bus stops, on curbs, in parks, hanging from bridges and traffic lights, floating down the Mapocho." The dead are everywhere, and Felipe uses "apocalyptic maths" to try to account for them all, millions on millions, their number added to dramatically by the murderous military government of Pinochet and company. Iquela's heart goes aflutter when she meets Paloma, an ever so cool young woman who has come to Santiago from Berlin; she smokes, has blonde hair, looks tough, and knows the ways of the world. Paloma is so mysterious that a cop wonders whether to bust her for smoking underage "or let her do as she pleased." Clearly Paloma does what she pleases most of the time, raised, like Iquela, in a home that has deep, hidden roots in the anti-Pinochet resistance movement. "We were so young," laments Iquela's mother, looking back on the day she met Paloma's mom, who, alas, has died—and now her body has gone missing somewhere on the other side of the Andes. She might be anywhere, Iquela observes: in an airplane hangar, in a morgue, back home in Berlin, or "locked inside the photograph hanging on the wall of my mother's dining room." Clueless, the three go on a winding journey in search of the wayward body, adding "an improvised inventory of corpses" to Felipe's endless calculations. The story is told matter-of-factly, with a few hints of magical realism layered in, especially as it draws to a close: They might be angels or Valkyries, perhaps ghosts themselves, but whatever they are, they're memorable companions on a strange trip.
Thanatofiction at its best and a debut that leaves the reader wanting more.
