Review by New York Times Review
ANYONE WHO HAS groaned and considered crawling under the table after taking a standardized test will delight in the literary high jinks .Alejandro Zambra performs in "Multiple Choice." Like an exam, the book contains various fill-in-the-blank sections and brief narratives in "Sentence Elimination," and concludes with fully developed stories in "Reading Comprehension," all of which point with increasing ferocity at the alienation of the test taker, which in turn illustrates the alienation of the tested citizen. Zambra was born in Chile in 1975, and his entire primary education took place during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. His four works of fiction that have been translated into English before "Multiple Choice" have been lauded for exploring how the repressive forces of that era continue to haunt the country today. This new book, however, is the first to focus solely on the role that education and testing played in constricting the discussion of art and ideas during the dictatorship - and still plays, more than 25 years later in the different context of today. Just last week, my 16-year-old niece in Chile took a multiple-choice test in her literature class that asked her and her classmates to identify "the correct order" of events in a Borges story. I shudder to think what Borges would make of such a question, which is really about testing a student's ability to recognize, and comply with, the intentions of the test maker. It is this underlying aim - the testing of compliance - that Zambra triumphantly subverts in dazzling, disorienting ways in "Multiple Choice." The book is a work of parody, but also of poetry. Zambra turns the structure and questions of the Chilean Academic Aptitude Test, finally phased out in 2003, into a new literary form. In the section titled "Sentence Completion," the entries read like Mad Lib aphorisms: 41. And if they have any ___ left, that's what___ for. A) energy B) hope C) illusions D) dissent E) neurons sports are reality is the void is the cops are crack cocaine is Zambra is playing around here, but it's high stakes, serious play. What to do when you're confined to a series of choices that all lead to despair? After the initial amusement of filling in "that's what the void is for," the absurd word pairs invite readers to consider what could be bearable in such a sentence, to ask themselves if, perhaps, "that's what art is for." Yet for all the discussion of frustration and misery in "Multiple Choice," it's in no way a miserable book to read. Zam bra's wry humor gives buoyancy to even the most disturbing story, narrated by the son of Manuel Contreras, who oversaw Pinochet's secret police. Also named Manuel, the son has the voice of a whiner. The narrative is broken into numbered sections. In the first few, Contreras complains about being "the son of one of the biggest criminals in Chilean history." A few entries later, he starts whining about Zambra. Entry 10 begins: "This is not me talking. ... My father will die soon. The person faking my voice knows this, and doesn't care." The entries escalate until Contreras starts swearing and threatening Zambra. Megan McDowell, who has translated a number of Zam bra's books into English, conveys the increasing absurdity and agitation in the Contreras narrative with language as blunt as the original. She attends to the lyricism of other sections with equal skill. Zambra has also published poetry, and in "Multiple Choice" he exhibits a poet's awareness of how the confines of a form, of an era, can push a writer to a place he might not have otherwise gone. Like a test taker, a writer sits both alone and among others. "You share your fragility in silence," he writes, "like a sacrifice." IDRA NOVEY is the author of the novel "Ways to Disappear" and two books of poetry.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 14, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
From the author of the spellbinding story collection My Documents (2015) comes an odd exercise in the limits of fiction in a tale modeled after the Chilean Academic Aptitude Test and combining poetry, prose, and interactive storytelling. Zambra mocks the conventions of standardized exams by pairing straightforward questions with absurd answer options. The section on Sentence Order playfully challenges the reader to rearrange sentences and create a multiplicity of microfictions reminiscent of such great 1960s literary experiments as Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch (1966). But what begins with bursts of nonsensical silliness evolves into progressively more coherent, and often more somber, narratives. One section requires the reader to decide which sentences to eliminate, forcing a choice that can mean the difference between life and death. Zambra ratchets up the intensity, culminating in several extended passages under the heading Reading Comprehension. The subsequent questions do not seek to quiz the reader's understanding so much as further interrogate the narrator's loyalty to family and country. An ambitious, hilarious, provocative work.--Báez, Diego Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this short, experimental book of fiction, Zambra (My Documents) skillfully adopts the form of a standardized test to spin off dozens of micro-tales. The form of the test, which is based on the actual Chilean Aptitude Test Zambra took as a youth, is composed of five numbered sections, totaling 90 questions. The book opens with questions and possible answers that are simply lists of words, not giving Zambra much room to stretch his storytelling wings. The following sections, composed of short sentences, read like flash fiction or prose poems and are frequently amusing and unexpected. Far more compelling are the longer "sentence elimination" sections wherein Zambra is able to deliver a self-contained short story in a handful of pages. In one story, a student convinces his smarter twin brother to take his exam for him. Another story presents a tricky problem for a couple getting married in Chile, when divorce was still illegal there. The final story is a touching message from a remorseful father to his son. Zambra's writing is intensely tied to his Chilean identity, and nearly every story or text references Chile in some way. In just a few pages he manages to be repeatedly engaging, smart, funny, and sad. Agent: Andrea Montejo, Indent Literary Agency. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
True or false: can effective fiction be written in the format of a standardized test? Answer: pretty much, and few are as equipped to do it as well as Chilean writer Zambra (My Documents, 2015, etc.), who has a penchant for experimentation. The book is broken up into 90 questions across five sections. At first those questions are largely ironic or comic in simplistic ways. For instance, the reader is asked to name the word that has no relation to "bear": "endure," "tolerate," "abide," "panda," or "kangaroo." But as the test focuses on completing, ordering, and eliminating sentences, it's clear Zambra is aiming for more sophisticated and poignant effects. The questions become flash-fiction tales about transition points like lost loves, the discovery of a tumor, and a grandfather's death, and the multiple-choice answers suggest that how we respond to a story depends heavily on where the writer places the narrative stress and what's omitted or added. (For instance, a first-person story about the successes and failures of his children prompts the reader to rethink the story if lines about grandchildren and planned pregnancies are removed.) This reaches a kind of climax in the "reading comprehension" section, made up of three brief stories about a scheming pair of twins and couples that have split up. The follow-up questions tend to highlight the absurdity of pat answers to works of fiction. ("What is the worst title for this storythe one that would reach the widest possible audience?") Even so, Zambra can sometimes insistently point to a "correct" answer: for a question in the story about school's influence, the only option is: "You weren't educated; you were trained." Though the overall effect is fragmentary, Zambra's fragments are consistently witty and provocative. A-minus. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
