The Remainder by Alia Trabucco Zeran

Paloma’s problem wasn’t the language, but the weightlessness of that word. That’s why I didn’t respond...and faced with my silence, it was Consuelo who finally spoke. And I switched off again, trying to avoid falling under the weight of those sentences, convinced, as I had been as a little girl, that we don’t live for a set number of years, but rather we’re assigned a set number of words that we can hear over the course of our lives. Each of my mother’s words was like a hundred, a thousand, regular ones, and killed me quicker. Perhaps that’s why I’d learned another language: to buy me more time.

When Women Kill, Alia Trabucco Zeran’s genre-defying semi-nonfiction work from last year, was one of my top 10 books, and as soon as I finished it, I went online to order this, her first (and only, as of 2023) novel. It is quite different, as one might expect given the distance between a memoirist approach to historical events and an actual novel, but it does share a lot of similar concerns: the impact of the past on those in the present, the treatment of the marginalized in Chile, and most prominently, the way the powerful in a society erase, rewrite, or hide anything and anyone that doesn’t serve their goals.

It opens, after a short prologue, at a party on October 8, 1988, the night Pinochet’s reign in Chile ended. The narrator, Iquela, is a child and doesn’t fully understand the impact of what’s happening. Her interest is less in the adults gathered around the radio, listening in shock as Pinochet is deposed, as it is in her friendship, and youthfully romantic rendezvous with her friend Paloma just outside, on the patio. The two share a kiss just as the gathering breaks into chaos: Paloma’s father punches Iquela’s and everyone disperses quickly, chaotically, and nothing is explained to the girls or Felipe, an adoptee who spends the book having visions in which he counts down casualties of the post-Pinochet violence that sweeps over Chile, desperate to reach zero, an accounting of all the dead that leaves no remainder. They’re brought together again, years later, when Paloma returns to Chile from Germany, where she’s been living with her mother, who has died and whose body has been sent, perhaps against her will, back to Chile to be buried. When Paloma arrives and meets with Iquala’s mother to claim the body, they find that it has not arrived; that it has, in fact, been lost in transit, and the three kids, now older teenagers, requisition an old hearse and set out on a road trip to get it back.

There’s a bit of As I Lay Dying in the structure, not just in the journey to inter a body properly but also in the way the narrators swap in and out, the main three but also occasionally another who is unnamed who may be Paloma’s mother speaking from beyond the grave, and chapters that are only a sentence or two long. Each of the primary narrators has a distinctive voice and concerns. Felipe’s sections are stream-of-consciousness, recounting nightmarish visions of bodies that need counted before they can find peace, often punctuated with moments of shocking physical or sexual violence. An outsider both by genealogy and temperament--his grandmother, tasked with caring for him after his father, a revolutionary, was killed, gave him to Iquala’s family after he brutally dismembered a parrot during one of his visions. He nurses an unrequited crush towards Iquela but is driven by his obsession with accounting for all the Chilean dead. Iquala narrates more traditionally and her concerns are largely relational--her difficult relationship with her overbearing mother, her surrogate sibling-ship with Felipe, her sapphic longings towards Paloma--deformed into complex shapes by trauma. And finally, Paloma spends most of the novel in a state of shock, convinced that finding her mother will resolve the conflict she feels about her expat status.

When they finally arrive at the airport where Paloma’s mother’s body was lost, they find a hanger stacked high with caskets, hundreds and hundreds of Chileans who’ve been forgotten, erased, mislabeled, ignored, left to rot until they’re disposed of by someone who can’t handle the smell anymore. I know I missed a lot of the subtext here, given my minimal knowledge of Chilean history, but in some ways the takeaway here is universal. In the end, the remainders are the children, the children’s children, who are left behind in the wake of nationalist violence and fracture, left with no past and no clear future.