A very well-written story collection from Alejandro Zambra, translated by the excellent Megan McDowell (https://www.meganmcdowelltranslation....)It consists of 11 stories (or 10 and a framing story), each around twenty pages, mostly set in modern-day Chile. The typical protagonist is a 20-30 year old male, typically single or in a casual relationship, into football, literature, smoking (Zeno's Conscience is an explicit influence) and casual sex, and with only a passing interest in politics (the

Huge fan of South American fiction. Huge fan of short fiction. Definitely huge fan of Alejandro Zambra.

Every once in a while, you find a new writer via recommendation from a website or a friend, and rarely among those authors, you find one whose work arrest you immediately with its directness, complexity and beauty. When you find such a writer you try to read everything by him. You find what he says in an interview, you wonder why have not you read him before. And you start reading his novella "Bonsai" next, and then of course "Ways of Going Home". The fragments of memories in "National Institute...

This is the best of the three books by Zambra I've read. It is a collection of short stories which are unashamedly masculine, but very moving and reflective. I loved how the reading as a part of life is always part of his stories even if in a negative way. The characters are often defined by their passion of reading or the lack of it. The books also are discussed as an integral part of the stories. More broadly in "My Documents" Zambra reflects on the generation of the "children of dictatorship"...

Reading Zambra makes me interested in working to rebuild the ruins of my broken Spanish so that I can read this without translation. Not that the translator did an awkward job, on the contrary, the prose is so fluid and playful that I am dying to know how it reads in the original. That being said, if anyone has read this in Spanish, I would be very interested to hear your take. I would say that all of these stories fit nicely together, the only exception, perhaps, being the last story, "Artist's...

While I was reading this collection of stories I watched the movie 'Bonsai', the adaptation of Zambra's first novel. While watching the movie 'Bonsai' I was reading the stories that Zambra wrote down in 'My Documents'. A story can be read on his own. A movie can be seen as one finished story. But Zambra's work is intertwined with everything around. It absorbs everything, first of all the history of events, and remembers the past with sentences that forms stories within a framework of writing. Wh...

Having been wholly unfamiliar with 40-year-old Chilean novelist Zambra before reading an altogether positive review of this short-story collection in the NY Times, it was nice to take full advantage of modern telefony and zap this thing to my e-reader not sixty seconds after completing said review. After finding that it took a little time to ramp up, ultimately I found this collection quite goofy, and at times quite illuminative of the dark crevices of the soul, while mostly told in a funny and

These are good short stories and the writing is interesting and original, but as the pervading theme is solitude and the characters are kind of directionless with dead-end jobs, relationships that don't work, etc. I found them a bit depressing -- not helped by the post-modern writing that undermines their solidity even more. So good but definitely dampened my mood.

I was a blank page, and now I am a book.We live in the age of computers, where our thoughts and feelings are transcribed into text and, like this review, become another source of data, another heartfelt addition to our My Documents folder. My own folder is filled with reviews, college essays, photographs of my daughter, my resume and other such documents and becomes a catalogue of a human life, a digital replication of the heart and soul. Alejandro Zambra, best known for his breathless and breat...

Childhood… Adolescence… Youth… I especially liked two stories: My Documents and Memories of a Personal Computer. They seem to be autobiographical and quite sincere.The first time I saw a computer was in 1980, when I was four or five years old. It’s not a pure memory, though—I’m probably mixing it up with other, later visits to my father’s office, on calle Agustinas. I remember my father explaining how those enormous machines worked, his black eyes fixed on mine, his perpetual cigarette in hand.

"I am a correspondent, but I would like to know of what"Alejandro Zambra (° 1975) is a Chilean, you cannot overlook this in this collection of short stories: repeatedly there are references to Pinochet and his dictatorship, to uncles and cousins who fled to Europe, and also to the Catholic tradition of covering up nasty things. These are not just contextual elements: if you take all the stories together, Zambra seems to give an outline of a "lost generation" in his country, grown up under the di...

My Documents is a book about memory (the first clue is the self-referencing in the title) and throughout this collection, the question keeps rising up: is Chilean author Alejandro Zambra writing mini-memoirs? Or is it fiction? Or (as I suspect) is it memoirs enhanced by fictional elements?There are intertwining references that thread together this collection. Pinochet. The character-as-writer. The ever-present computer. Failure of communication. In his story “Memories of a Personal Computer”, Mr...

I don’t know why I put off reading this for so long because it was amazing. He writes in a just-detached-enough way that it lends more vividness to the stories and the characters. Also the stories do the short story that covers the course of a whole life thing really well, which a lot of stories don’t. “My Documents,” “Memories of a Personal Computer, “I Smoked Very Well” were my faves.

Light Lonesomenessfirst appeared in a different form in The New Indian ExpressAt two-hundred and forty pages, My Documents is Zambra's longest English translated work by a considerable margin; this has us conviced that Zambra is not interested in the big fat Latin American novel, which is strangely comforting. Like his compatriot Roberto Bolano, Zambra’s protagonists are often melancholic soloists; though unlike Bolano’s savage poets, Zambra’s men don’t become vagabonds, choosing instead to move...

if u like casually reading about rape, incest and other shitty male behaviors with no accountability this is the book for u. the only merit was the way in which the author showed how the pinochet dictatorship penetrated people's consciousness and experiences in both mundane and profound ways.

"If 'publish or perish' is an academic creed, Alejandro Zambra abides by 'polish or perish.' The eleven narratives included under an ingenious title, which alludes to whatever notion of archive one adheres to, have been published as fiction, as parts of essays or critical notes. Now organized into three sections, each with a common thread, the character studies within each tale also have a cumulative power that makes Mis documentos perhaps the best short-story collection of the last two decades....

Poignant stories that largely remind me of how fragile memories are - that we reconstruct parts of our lives depending on what suits us eventually, that we find solace in this freedom at times, even if irrational. Particularly liked the stories "Memories of a Personal Computer", "I smoked very well", and "True or False", although the others were really good too. Each story reveals to us the psyche of the character - the author is definitely very imaginative and observant of why we do what we do....

Hated the way he writes about women so much I couldn’t even finish it.

Zambra writes true, and I'm here for it.

I had already thought that this collection was solely about the lives of mediocre, boring men before getting to the rape scene in the middle, and then it was just a ruined read. What a waste of writerly talent. The grandma who makes an appearance on page 15 is the only interesting character! I guess it’s nice that gay experiences can be so offhanded and bland as to feel normal, but it’s also disappointing that not a single gay mention was interesting to me.