Funny and a little harsh and over before you're ready, just like everything else.
Bonsai
Two young literature lovers in Santiago stumble into a romance whose ending is announced before it begins.
110g
Weighs the same as Tuna Packet + Hand Sanitizer
- Ultralight
- Quiet Companion
- Fiction
Emilia is going to die, and Julio will be left alone. That's how this micro-epic of young love begins. Knowing how it ends makes the hundred pages on the part in between — two students meeting in Santiago who lie about having read Proust and fall in love both with each other and with literature — vibrant and affecting. It's funny and a little harsh and over before you're ready, just like everything else. A love story short enough to read twice on the same beach day — and sad enough that you will.
Field notes
Bonsai began in 1998 with a photograph of trees wrapped in fabric by artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Zambra, then a poet, wrote an unsuccessful poem inspired by the image and became fascinated by bonsai cultivation. He eventually conceived a book that would be not a novel but the summary of one, assembled from fragments and ruthlessly pruned. He was troubled by bonsai's beauty: the miniature trees achieve their elegance through the deliberate restriction of their growth.