Multiple-choice questions are extremely polarising. Depending on whether they’ve enabled you or completely wrecked your self-worth (most entrance exams in India use some form of MCQ-based selection/elimination), you look back at them wondering what that life was like. The spectrum is wide, the thrill from gaming the system – finding a unique way to solve a question to bashing your head over options that look deceptively similar, wondering why you decided to put yourself through this. Multiple variations of the cheesy one-liner “How every incorrect choice selection changes your honeymoon location from Mauritius to Mussorie to Mahabaleshwar” have existed on the interwebz, such is the extent that these tiny, little annoyances play a role in one’s formative years. Or at least one thinks so, who knows. Confirmation and survivor bias, both are extremely real.
Alejandro Zambra’s Multiple Choice is experimental fiction at its very peak. The cover, very well designed, is a great indication of what’s in store. It is everything and nothing at the same time, curated in the format of the Chilean Academic Aptitude Test, their national standardized examination for college. Comprising of five numbered sections taken from the verbal section with a total of 90 questions, the chapters are titled with the likes of ‘Sentence elimination’, ‘Reading Comprehension’, and ‘Sentence order’. Quite frankly, I’d never seen something like this and added to the intrigue leading me to pick this up in the first place. The book touches on several themes including the political upheaval in Chile, cheating in examinations, marriage troubles, and annulments, distorted parent-child relationships, and familial structures.
The book is surely a tale of two halves – certain portions seemingly mostly everything unsaid, expecting the reader to plug the holes and make connections as you would do in an exam but in a more self-reflective manner. Even amongst the MCQs, sometimes he’d curate a perception of choice for the reader to define their understanding of the text while in some cases Zambra absolutely spells out with the jibes, fairly visible. The open nature of the prose, despite the limitations of the format ironically, makes you chuckle and gnaw your teeth in frustration one after the other. Like I said, it’s weird but that’s how Zambra like it, clearly.
The Read: It took me a while to get into the book, as it turned out. You can see what Zambra is trying to do with the MCQs but it really kicked in for me in the ‘Reading Comprehension’ chapter where the relatively extended prose allowed me to glean the subtle undertones of what was being conveyed. Also, it’s important to remember this is a translation, so some of the original intent in the one-off questions might have been misplaced as is often the case when taken out of the original context. I liked the humour and the witty subtext accompanying most of the writing but perhaps my reticence to parse poetry, in general, ensured that I was underwhelmed by certain portions. I would go so far as calling this a strange read, because of its format and the mixed feelings one has post-completion. It makes you want to read more of Zambra’s works to see what he can do when not limited by the quadrant of 4 options and I’d like to think that’ll be nice. Pick this up:
a) If you’d like to experiment with a novel format
b) You’re okay with seeming amounts of ambiguity
c) you’re a poem buff
d) Take a punt and find out or maybe not
Trivia: The traditional making of ayahuasca, a South American therapeutic brew mentioned in the book, involves sections of Banisteriopsis caapi vine being macerated and boiled alone or with leaves from any of a number of other plants. In the Quechua languages, aya means “spirit, soul”, or “corpse, dead body”, and waska means “rope” or “woody vine”, “liana”. Here’s a nice little read on how it became the latest trend in Brooklyn and Silicon Valley.
9/365.
Documentation
Book: Multiple Choice
Author: Alejandro Zambra
Year of Release: 2014, 2016
Publisher: Penguin Books