And it is a story told in prose that races across the page: prose that tangles and backtracks, like the hearse the characters are traveling in, like the body they are collecting, like their shared histories.Īlia’s most recent book is Las Homicidas, which is available in Spanish here, and is forthcoming in English from Coffeehouse Press (US) and And Other Stories (UK). It’s about the liminality of the road, of the borders between countries and between flat land and mountain range. It’s about those who try to leave their country and their trauma behind, and the way it snaps them back to where they came from. It’s a story about young Chileans growing up with the burden of a dictatorship they barely remember but which has irrevocably shadowed their lives, their hopes, their loves, and their actions. It’s a story of a death, a road trip, trauma that echoes, numbers that tell an uncomfortable truth, and the slim edge between past and present. The Remainder is a story about three young people. I think about the tipping point between motion and action: the moment where everything balances on a slim edge, then snaps, tumbles, and changes. Inertia is movement without change, but often when I think about it, I think about the external actions that force change and disrupt inertia. When planning for Huellas’ second issue focused around the theme of ‘inertia,’ this book immediately came to mind. Having always been intrigued by the cordillera that outlines the Chilean border, and the literature that touches and transcends it, I was immediately captured by Alia Trabucco Zerán’s The Remainder, while looking for contemporary Chilean literature.

Alia spoke about the way a body experiences time and inertia during a pandemic, and the books that have kept her company in quarantine, when the body is held still, inertial, while the mind roams free. In this interview I asked Chilean author Alia Trabucco Zerán about her craft, about violence inherited and inherent in a country and culture, and about translation. Para leer esta entrevista en español, haz clic aquí.

The Remainder by Alia Trabucco Zerán