Description

Alejandro Zambra’s Methods for Going House starts by having an earthquake, observed through the eyes of an unnamed nine-year-old child who lives within an undistinguished middleclass property improvement in a suburb of Santiago, Chile. The protagonist gets his first view of Claudia, an older woman who asks him to spy on her behalf dad Raúl. In the 2nd section, once the neighbors camp-out immediately, the protagonist may be the author of the story started in the first section. His dad is just a man of few words who claims to be apolitical but who silently sympathized—to what level, the writer isn’t sure—with the Pinochet regime. His insights on the improvement of the book and on their own life—which is noticeably like the existence of his novel’s protagonist—expose the uncooked suture of misinformation and reality. Ways of Heading House changes between author and character, past and present, highlighting with despair and trend on the real history of the country and on a generation created also late—the generation which, whilst the author-narrator puts it, learned to see and write while their parents turned accomplices or patients.