The Remainder (International Edition)

by Alia Trabucco Zerán

Overview

Santiago, Chile. The city is covered in ash. Three children of ex-militants are facing a past they can neither remember nor forget. Felipe sees dead bodies on every corner of the city, counting them up in an obsessive quest to square these figures with the official death toll. He is searching for the perfect zero, a life with no remainder. Iquela and Paloma, too, are searching for a way to live on. When the body of Paloma’s mother is lost in transit, the three take a hearse and a bottle of pisco up the cordillera for a road trip with a difference. Intense, intelligent, and extraordinarily sensitive to the shape and weight of words, this remarkable debut presents a new way to count the cost of a pain that stretches across generations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781911508328
Publisher:	And Other Stories Publishing
Publication date:	10/04/2018
Edition description:	International
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.75(h) x (d)

About the Author

Alia Trabucco Zerán was born in Chile in 1983. Awarded a Fulbright scholarship for her MFA in Creative Writing at New York University, she holds a PhD in Spanish and Latin American Studies from UniversityCollege London. La Resta (The Remainder), her debut novel, won the Best Unpublished Literary Work prize from the Chilean Council for the Arts in 2014, and on publication was chosen by El País as one of its top ten debuts of 2015.

Read an Excerpt

‘Nine fifteen am: the telephone rings. Nine twenty: buy the paper, buy some fresh bread, buy a little more time. Nine forty: walk the eight and a half blocks to find her, without fail, drenching the lawn, the flagstones, the chipped wicker furniture in the front garden. And then our series of false starts would begin: we would be talking and my mother would start cooking or doing her make-up; we would be talking and my mother would water the plants or put away the shopping; we would be talking and my mother would start reminiscing, forcing me to stay another twenty minutes, half an hour, forty minutes, which would drag painfully slowly as she repeated the same old stories, her emphases and regrets always unchanged.’

Editorial Reviews

Sharp and colourful, contrasting well with her characters’ furious attempts to come to terms with the past ... The Remainder is well translated, stimulating and grapples skilfully with a complex subject.” Michael Eaude, Literary Review

“[a] darkly comic road trip ... [Trabucco-Zéran’s] spring-heeled prose moves lightly from lyrical to demotic, bawdy to elegiac.” The Spectator

“Intelligent and immersive ... elegiac.” TLS

“In a notable translation by Sophie Hughes, Zerán’s lyricism and eye for detail shine on the page ... There is plenty to commend in the book’s intentions, and in its elegiac ambitions.” The Irish Times

“[The Remainder] tells us ... everything about what it is like to grow up in the shadow of other people’s unhappiness.” The Big Issue

“Striking ... rendered with impressive fluidity” Katie Da Cunha Lewin, The White Review

“I have encountered few writers capable of so perfectly capturing the weight of inherited memories ... macabre, complex, rich writing.” Gary Perry, Foyles

“In a notable translation by Sophie Hughes, Zerån's lyricism and eye for detail shine on the page.” Irish Times

“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

“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, Instrucciones de Uso

“A Chilean road trip reveals new ways to think about historical memory.” Alba Lara, Iowa Literaria

“One of the best publications of 2015.” Patricia Espinosa, Las Ultimas Noticias

“A triumphant debut.” Antonio Skármeta, El Mercurio

“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

“Intelligent and uncompromising, and as unforgettably vivid as noir.” Chloe Aridjis

“A powerful, impressive novel, dotted with scenes that are as unique as they are unforgettable.” Lina Meruane

"Thanatofiction at its best and a debut that leaves the reader wanting more." Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher