Alejandro Zambra is my favourite living writer. His short stories are all basically about the same thing, or at least use the same materials. Here, an Argentine woman and a Chilean man in an ambiguous relationship have an ambiguous experience in Mexico City. This has happened to all of us, or is going to.
First published in Spanish in Mis documentos in 2023, translated to English by Megan McDowell as My Documents, Fitzcarraldo Press, 2015. Available to read online here
I find I don’t want to tell you anything at all about this one – just encourage you to go on the journey.
I can tell you that, on the strength of this story, I went and read the whole of My Documents – the collection it comes from – and, although no other story in the collection affected me quite like this one, I thought the whole thing was great, and two other stories from it I particularly like are ‘Camilo’ and ‘Family Life’.
First published in Spanish in Mis documentos in 2013. Also in 2013, Megan McDowell’s English translation of the story was first published on vice.com. Her translation of the whole collection – My Documents, in English – then came out in 2015. The story was available on vice.com until recently, and seems like it’s meant to be still, only there’s a problem with the webpage. Happily, it’s also available on The Short Story Project website
This is a story of a chapter in a man’s life told through his personal computer.
It begins when he is twenty three, and buys the computer to type up his poems. Then he starts going out with a woman, or we should really say a woman starts using the computer. She plays minesweeper and solitaire while he sleeps. When they move in together, the computer moves neighbourhoods. They upload pictures of their almost-honeymoon. Later when they argue, letters fall off the keyboard.
Perhaps in summary this reads like a creative writing class exercise (write a story from the perspective of a household object). But in the reading it is infused with Zambra’s magic: the funny-sad way he has of capturing messy relationships, the life of work and being tired after work, his character’s sour opinions of those around him.
From My Documents, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015
A Personal Anthology 