Multiple Choice
Alejandro Zambra
[Granta Books]
Taking multiple choice tests makes you feel:
a) Panicked
b) Bored
c) Defiant
d) Hopeless
e) All of the above
Since 1967, graduating high school students in Chile have had to take a multiple choice exam, the Chilean Academic Aptitude Test. Ninety questions long and in five sections, Alejandro Zambra’s Multiple Choice follows the same format, posing questions and encouraging readers to select the “correct” answer. A few questions in, Zambra is already making his intentions known. Those diligent readers who begin by trying to identify the correct answer will find themselves confounded by the increasingly absurd options facing them. The book is vehemently not an exam, rather it is a test of another sort – a puzzle, a challenge to the reader to defy the questions, an invitation to play. It is an indignant howl of rage at a system that teaches people not to think, not to engage. The energy of this howl remains intact, however, and it has been condensed into a joke, infused with Zambra’s trademark wry humour.
The subject matter is as serious as it gets, encompassing politics, the Pinochet dictatorship, lost love, and disastrous interpersonal relationships to name but a few, but the treatment is playful and ludic. Separated into the sections “Excluded Term”, “Sentence Order”, “Sentence Completion”, “Sentence Elimination”, and “Reading Comprehension”, the joke is predicated on the impossibility of ordering the human experience in this way. The reader chooses how to play Zambra’s game, just as they choose the answers, but the real question posed by the book is how it could ever be possible or useful to categorise the world within the binary restrictions we understand as right or wrong. At times it can feel too knowingly clever-clever, and at times simply flippant. But, masterfully translated by Megan McDowell, stories emerge through this unconventional form that engage on a deeply emotional level, combining the cerebral game with a thoroughly compassionate and curious exploration of the messy business of being human, none of which fits so neatly into boxes.
Words – Liza Cox
