About the Book
Reader, your life is full of choices. Some will bring you joy and others will bring you heartache. Will you choose to cheat (in life, the examination that follows) or will you choose to copy? Will you fall in love? If so, will you remember her name and the number of freckles on her back? Will you marry, divorce, annul? Will you leave your run-down neighbourhood, your long-suffering country and your family? Will you honour your dead, those you loved and those you didn't? Will you have a child, will you regret it? Will you tell them you regret it? Will you, when all's said and done, deserve a kick in the balls? Will you find, here, in this slender book, fictions that entertain and puzzle you? Fictions that reflect yourself back to you? Will you find yourself?
Relax, concentrate, dispel any anxious thoughts. Let the world around you settle and fade. Are you ready? Now turn over your papers, and begin.
About the Author :
Alejandro Zambra is the author of the story collection My Documents, a finalist for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, and three previous novels: Ways of Going Home, The Private Lives of Trees, and Bonsai, which won Chile's Literary Critics' Award for Best Novel. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper's, Tin House, and McSweeney's, among others. In 2010, he was named one of Granta's Best Young Spanish-language Novelists.
Review :
This year I was very happy to discover Alejandro Zambra. His new book, Multiple Choice, brilliantly translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, manages to blend Oulipian poetry, funny-sad short stories and choose-your-own-advevnture
To my mind, the best of what experimental fiction be
This is composition set in the key of fun - ironic, playful, sometimes bitter. The translation by Megan McDowell skims across the tricky terrain with grace and ease, capturing the comic absurdities and dark moments without any apparent linguistic stumble or pause... [Zambra has] a wonderfully seductive, ludic charm. Multiple Choice will be embraced by Zambra's devoted followers. Open-minded readers new to his quirky world could find it opening doors. Multiple doors perhaps
Brilliant... funny... part philosophical parody, part satire, this is a highly original and poignant book
A masterful act of transformation that turns the reader into writer. Zambra gives us fragments, but he also gives us the autonomy to shore them up into something new: our very own book
Zambra builds an elegant structure out of the important elements of life-competition, pride, vigor, death, sex-against a landscape of political menace. Read his book and, as with all true art, you'll be left wondering what it means but feeling that you know
Multiple Choice is unlike anything I've ever encountered before. With his test questions and answers, the incomparable Alejandro Zambra creates verbal playgrounds for reverie, imagination, thought, and memory, and leads you through labyrinthine corridors in which you inevitably encounter yourself. Reading this book is a wonderfully disconcerting and unforgettable experience
I loved Multiple Choice. I hate exams, but I've sat this one a few times already. I'd give it an A-. The minus for being too smart and getting the fuck away with it
There is no writer like Alejandro Zambra, no one as bold, as subtle, as funny. Multiple Choice is his most accomplished work yet, an apparently playful literary game you quickly realize is also deadly serious. This book is not to be missed
As slim as Chile herself. As serrated and complex as her riddled coastline. There's so much to admire and enjoy in this dazzling little book
Brilliant... Like a literary exercise for the mind, but strangely fun to decode. Keep yourself sharp with one of the most interesting writers working right now'
When I read Zambra I feel like someone's shooting fireworks inside my head. His prose is as compact as a grain of gunpowder, but its allusions and ramifications branch out and illuminate even the most remote corners of our minds
Falling in love with Zambra's literature is a fascinating road to travel. Imaginative and original, he is a master of short forms; I adore his devastating audacity
Zambra is the defining light of today's Latin American literature - an author whose cult is about to take over, the one we'll all be congratulating ourselves on having known about in the early days, before his deceptively slender masterpieces lay on ever American reader's night table. Multiple Choice is the most daring distillation yet of his inimitable, take-no-prisoners genius
I loved Multiple Choice. I hate exams, but I've sat this one a few times already. I'd give it an A-. The minus for being too smart and getting the fuck away with it.
An experimental novella, written in the form of a multiple choice examination... Brilliant, innovative, beautiful - David Markson's Vanishing Point meets Junot Diaz's This Is How You Lost Her.
A metatextual blast... the only real problem with this unusually pleasurable exam is that it's over far too quickly
[Multiple Choice] blends fiction and memoir and messes enthusiastically with form. It is funny, melancholy, surprising. It is silly at times, profound at others. Its interactivity will entertain you, and might just change the way you think about fiction
One of the books of 2016... Full of wit, spark, pathos and insight... Multiple Choice goes beyond all expectations in terms of originality... [It is] one of the most thought-provoking, original and rewarding reads of the year... [as well as] a surprisingly touching and immersive experience... Once I'd finished it the urge to immediately read it again [was] pretty much irresistible. It was even better the second time
Intriguing... [Multiple Choice] starts as comic wordplay but morphs gradually into a volley of melancholy nano-stories... inventive in form
Tantalising... Mordantly funny and highly arresting [...] with nods to that great Latin American experimentalist Borges
Zambra's field of enquiry overspills the historical and political. It spreads far beyond Chilean borders and slips the bounds of narrative to question the very idea of a single, correct and definitive answer
Original and deeply moving
Slowly, but surely, the questions and potential answers reveal profound takes on life in Chile under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet - both funny and melancholic... For all the plainness of the prose, read aloud this exercise and it almost takes the form of a sonnet. It is also heartbreaking
Zambra offers a series of vignettes - even short stories by the end - with multiple interpretations, or versions, layered on top of each other
