Ratings12
Average rating4
A "brilliant, innovative, beautiful" (The Guardian) book from the acclaimed author of Chilean Poet "Dazzling . . . a work of parody, but also of poetry." —The New York Times Book Review NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR, THE GUARDIAN, AND THE IRISH TIMES “Latin America’s new literary star” (The New Yorker), Alejandro Zambra is celebrated around the world for his strikingly original, slyly funny, daringly unconventional fiction. Now, at the height of his powers, Zambra returns with his most audaciously brilliant book yet. Written in the form of a standardized test, Multiple Choice invites the reader to respond to virtuoso language exercises and short narrative passages through multiple-choice questions that are thought-provoking, usually unanswerable, and often absurd. It offers a new kind of reading experience, one in which the reader participates directly in the creation of meaning, and the nature of storytelling itself is called into question. At once funny, poignant, and political, Multiple Choice is about love and family, authoritarianism and its legacies, and the conviction that, rather than learning to think for ourselves, we are trained to obey and repeat. Serious in its literary ambition and playful in its execution, it confirms Alejandro Zambra as one of the most important writers working in any language. NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE SUMMER BY THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, ELLE, THE HUFFINGTON POST, THE MILLIONS, VOX, LIT HUB, THE BBC, THE GUARDIAN AND PUREWOW
Reviews with the most likes.
Inventive and poetic. This book is very different, formatted into an exam, and I suspect others will try to emulate this in the future. You don't need to know anything about Chilean history or Pinochet's regime, but it doesn't hurt if you do.
Thought provoking, and at times, humorous but dark. The book has a unique format, and I love how he uses the multiple choice bubble test format to show that some questions have no correct answer, but sometimes others force you and expect you to choose something. It's really fun to see how many diferent meanings a poem can take just by rearranging the sentences.
Without knowledge of Chile's history and culture, a lot of the references would have been lost on me
This was the kind of book I needed, just to float in a space for a short while