A father takes his 20-year-old son on a multi-day trip from Santiago de Chile to southern Peru so that the boy can see a dentist. In the Chilean health system, those who have no money are inadequately cared for; visiting a dentist in the neighboring country is affordable. The son tells the story, who not only has a dental problem but is also very overweight. This becomes clear above all in the reactions of the others, the friends, the strangers, the grandfather, who at best comment on his blood-red teeth and his obesity with know-it-all advice. When he eats everything that has brought him his condition in a fast-food restaurant, passers-by stop and stare.
Like his narrator, the author was born in the far north of Chile, in Iquique, and moved to Santiago in 2000 at the age of 13. A look at the author’s photo suggests that obesity is an autobiographical element that Zúñiga apparently uses in his novel. His text is all the more reduced. From fragments that barely fill a page, Diego Zúñiga constructs the inner life of a boy who fate has bestowed on him all the disadvantages and who hides behind sobriety.
The father left him and the mother for a younger one. The mother is poor, she has already lost her teeth, and she is also overweight. Because of the heating costs, he shares the bed with her. On the street he falls victim to young bullies. Zúñiga tells all of this in a remarkably dry tone, which the translator emphatically reproduces. The voice that speaks here largely ignores what feelings could mean.
A jury voted him on the list of the most promising young authors in Latin America: Diego Zúñiga, born in 1987.
(Photo: Cristobal Olivares)
When the father rants on the journey about what he has done for his son, he puts his headphones in his ears. He doesn’t remember a reason or other circumstances of the suicide of a close friend, but the sound of the bones on impact. Even when he was trying to get scholarships, the message of success remained unemotional: “Fortunately, I got them all.”
The moments of intimacy with the mother are all the more poignant. The son wants to be a radio sports reporter and practices in front of muted sports reports on TV. Then he starts interviewing his mother about her life. Her answers hint at family catastrophes: sometimes by the mother, sometimes by the father, families abandoned, an uncle who was killed, the tragic loneliness that characterizes the mother’s life. But “during one of the interviews, she would tell me that it was better not to remember anything.”
Diego Zuniga: Camanchaca. Novel. Translated from the Spanish by Luise von Berenberg. Berenberg Verlag, Berlin 2022. 120 pages, 22 euros.
The situation takes a turn when the mother asks her son to answer her questions about his childhood. From the question-and-answer game comes all the psychological depth that a conventional novel would have to develop in flashbacks: what it was like when the parents split up, the baseball games with the neighbors’ children, the evenings when he was home alone and on his mother was waiting.
Zúñiga rightly received an award for this book, which was published in 2009 by a small publisher in Chile and then taken over by the large publisher Random House in 2012. In any case, he is one of the literary hopes of his country. A jury voted him onto the list of the most promising young authors in Latin America, which also includes Samanta Schweblin, who is already well known in this country.
Zúñiga himself described his text as an etude in childhood storytelling. Just like the effect of the Camanchaca of the title, namely the fog that spreads from the sea over the country with the evening cooling, so that the landmarks that one could have used for orientation gradually become invisible, this is how he interprets the puzzle to a broken family more than he spells it out.