Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra

This book opens in the 1990s, when Gonzalo and Carla are high-school students in love. Inevitably, they break up; surprisingly, they get back together about a decade later. Gonzalo is an aspiring poet, though he is passive, pessimistic, and dismissive of his own ambitions. He sees Chile the way he sees himself—unserious and stuck in adolescence. For him, the United States represents adulthood. Chile’s contemporary poets are the one thing he sees as laudable about the country, and uses them to explore what it means to be Chilean. Of course, it is hardly surprising that a book in which a loose crowd of poets represents a paradigm for a national future doesn’t present a settled projection of what that might look like. Chile may have a tradition of poet-diplomats, but poetry is a vehicle for dreams and projections into the past and even the future, but not public policy.