The Remainder
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A coffin, a camera, a bottle of pisco: three friends embark on a road trip through the Andes to confront a history they can neither remember nor forget.
Felipe and Iquela, two young friends in modern day Santiago, live in the legacy of Chile’s dictatorship. Felipe prowls the streets counting dead bodies real and imagined, aspiring to a perfect number that might offer closure. Iquela and Paloma, an old acquaintance from Iquela’s childhood, search for a way to reconcile their fragile lives with their parents’ violent militant past. The body of Paloma’s mother gets lost in transit, sending the three on a pisco-fueled journey up the cordillera as they confront the pain that stretches across generations.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Zer n's lyrical, surrealistic debut, shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, explores the long shadows of Chile's brutal Pinochet dictatorship. Chapters in the voice of the sensible Iquela alternate with those from the manic yet often insightful viewpoint of her longtime friend Felipe Arrabal. As the novel opens, the two Santiago residents are about 30. Translator Iquela copes with the clinginess of her widowed mother, Consuelo, a former anti-Pinochet activist, while Felipe believes he sees dead bodies everywhere and obsesses over calculations attempting to match their numbers against recorded births. Consuelo's friend Ingrid dies, leaving a request that her body be repatriated from Germany, her longtime residence, to her Chilean homeland. Ingrid's daughter, Paloma, arrives safely in Santiago to begin the process, but when an ash storm blanketing Chile diverts the plane carrying the corpse to Argentina, Paloma, Iquela, and Felipe decide to rent a hearse and cross the cordillera to fetch the coffin. Zer n's indirect treatment of Pinochet and his impact may challenge those unfamiliar with Chilean history, but this allusive quality suits a novel focused on those who experience atrocity secondhand. This novel is vividly rooted in Chile, yet the quests at its heart to witness and survive suffering, to put an intractable past to rest are universally resonant.
