The Private Lives of Trees by Alejandro Zambra

Author:Alejandro Zambra [Zambra, Alejandro]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

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Still, he keeps thinking about the snow, a ghostly space that’s usually relegated to novels: a world where young people fall gravely ill and old people remember past loves. The snow is a crude and beautiful fraud, just like the bonsai he’s obsessed with. He would like to see the snow—to have seen it, all throughout his life. At eighteen years old, for example, to have boarded a bus, gotten a job in the kitchen of a five-star hotel, taken orders from a slave-driving chef, a newly retired soldier, most likely. He imagines himself looking up from below, from the snow, at a ski lift full of tiny tourists.

He approaches the wall of the white room: with absurd seriousness, he tries to decide whether it is white like winter or white like snow. He doesn’t know if it’s possible to paint a wall the color of snow. He has never seen snow. He closes his eyes and presses on his eyelids for twenty, thirty seconds. And he returns, cautious and fearful, to this story of hard edges, which at times resembles a paint-by-numbers book. There are three rooms, and three small paperback series: blue, white, green, beige, red, and brown. Calle Arturo Prat is brown. Chilean literature is brown. The room is white, and maybe the snow, too, is white. The streets are not white; the streets are light blue or dark blue, sea green, emerald green, red, pink, yellow. Ahumada is red, Recoleta is pink, and Tobalaba, the street parallel to the passage where he lives now, is sky blue, same as Bilbao. Diez de Julio and Vicuña Mackenna are orange-colored streets.

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