Those fans have yearned for more from Ridgway in the long years since, have been disheartened when he intimated he had turned his back on fiction, only to wake up now with a start at the news that, out of the blue, he has produced a work at least as involving, clear-eyed and unsettling as Hawthorn & Child. His new novel features interlocking stories through which a clutch of more or less loosely connected characters appear, disappear and reappear.
They are all of them on the fringes of London life, often clinging on to sanity or solvency or a story by their fingertips. Ridgway writes about people whose understanding of their own situation is only ever partial and fuzzy, who are consumed by emotions and anxieties and narratives, or the lack thereof, that they cannot master. He focuses on peripheral figures who mean well and to whom things happen, and happen confusingly, and his fictional strategies reflect this focus.
Most of his characters are most sharply revealed by the imprecision of their own language in dialogue; its so deft, and its a high-wire act but he achieves the right balance between the imperatives of drama and fidelity toward his characters. And his observational writing is always pin-sharp and often breathtaking.
ISBN 9781529064810
Description
Bonsai is the story of Julio and Emilia, two young Chilean students who, seeking truth in great literature, find each other instead. Like all young couples, they lie to each other, revise themselves, and try new identities on for size, observing and analyzing their love story as if it's one of the great novels they both pretend to have read. As they shadow each other throughout their young adulthoods, falling together and drifting apart, Zambra spins a formally innovative, metafictional tale that brilliantly explores the relationship among love, art, and memory.
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