Zambra’s examination of Chilean history is driven by a vibrant sense of story. Illustration by Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo; Reference: Alma Rodríguez Ayala / Agencia EL UNIVERSAL / AP

People kept mentioning his name, but I was slow to encounter the Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra. I hadn’t read anything by him before opening his new story collection, “My Documents” (McSweeney’s). The title story is immediately captivating; it bolts straight out of the book, running at the reader in gusts of life and joy. Though the narrator and the author may not be identical, the wonderful details have the liberated onrush of memory: they tumble like things randomly released, not lengthily chosen. The narrator reaches back to memories of his Santiago childhood and brings us vivid scenes: life at secondary school, where his friend Dante, a very tall, autistic boy, wanders about, telling everyone his exact weight (“Hi, today I’m weighing 227 pounds”); the narrator’s mother, who becomes obsessed with Simon and Garfunkel and plasters the marital bedroom with posters of her idols, despite her husband’s irritation; and going to Mass, where the priest (who can be seen zooming around the neighborhood on a scooter) hurries through the homily, “delivering it with a pleasant disdain, and even making, quite often, a hand gesture that meant ‘et cetera.’ ”

The story begins like this: “The first time I saw a computer was in 1980, when I was four or five years old.” The little boy sees the strange object in his father’s office. But his mother, though trained on a computer, prefers a typewriter, on which she types up songs, poems, and stories written by the narrator’s grandmother, who “was always entering some contest.” (Hence the narrator’s formulation “My father was a computer and my mother was a typewriter.”) This grandmother is remembered as a woman of ready phrases. If someone suggested that it was cold outside, she would return with: “Well, it certainly isn’t hot.” And instead of just saying the word “no”

she was quick to reply “Not at all, as the fish said,” or just “As the fish said,” or simply “Fish,” to summarize this saying: “Not at all, as the fish said when asked how he’d like to be cooked, in the oven or the fryer.”

The grandmother, though a believer, has little time for organized religion. “I don’t need to say prayers,” she tells her grandson. “It’s enough to have a conversation with Jesus, freely, before I go to sleep,” a statement that the boy finds curious and a bit intimidating. At school, in 1985, there is a new teacher, Juan Luis Morales Rojas, who instructs the class to repeat his name, which the children do with burgeoning confidence and volume: “And after a while we were shouting and jumping while he moved his hands like an orchestra director, or like a musician who was enjoying listening to the audience sing along to the chorus of one of his songs.” When the kids get tired of shouting and laughing, the teacher tells them that now they will never forget his name: “In all my years at that school, I don’t remember a happier moment than that one.”

The title story (also the first) is worth lingering over, because it’s so appealing and funny, and because it displays in miniature Zambra’s delicate talents. On the one hand, the writer opens his senses wide, to the jubilant secularism of remembered detail, to a cataloguing of life that seems free, unjudged, open-ended—those schoolchildren, for instance, shouting the teacher’s name again and again, the scene apparently placed in the story for no better reason than that it still delights. On the other hand, these are Chilean schoolchildren, and Alejandro Zambra was born in 1975, two years after the coup that brought down President Salvador Allende and installed the murderous Augusto Pinochet, so history will fatally interrupt—interrupt, then warp and dominate. The narrator tells us that after the attempt on General Pinochet’s life, in 1986, Dante went around asking everyone in the neighborhood “if they belonged to the right or the left.” Now the narrator begins to hear about those who have been arrested, tortured, disappeared. He is filled with feelings of “impropriety, of ignorance, smallness, estrangement.” With his friends, he is left-wing, but at home he is more right-wing. Mainly, he keeps quiet and tries to fit in.

Two years later, in 1988, he enters the National Institute, Chile’s oldest secondary school (which Zambra himself attended). “And that’s when, at the same time, democracy and adolescence arrived. The adolescence was real. The democracy wasn’t.” Many Chilean Presidents were educated at the National Institute, including Salvador Allende. To be at such a school is to be political, whether one wants to be or not. The unstoppable jubilance of the kids who endlessly shouted their teacher’s name has become something else, something warier, more knowing, disillusioned. And by 1994, when the narrator enters the University of Chile, even the sweetness of his musings about childhood computers and typewriters has been subtly stained. As a student, he uses a computer, but he always erases his files: “I didn’t want to leave any records.” The narrator’s “documents” are at once innocent and corrupted. They are nothing more than a joyous calendar of reminiscence, and at the same time a bitter reckoning with history, and the reader understands that there can be no purely innocent fictional record, however much the author may long for it. “I was a blank page, and now I am a book” is the last line of this story, one that stands as a kind of admonition for the rest of Zambra’s collection: blank pages get written on, scored, scrawled over, filled up, and used up. And, in ways both good and bad, books can’t be erased as easily as computer files.

“My Documents” is the fourth book by Alejandro Zambra to be translated into English (this one very ably by Megan McDowell). All of them are very short and strikingly original, and display a wry self-consciousness about the obligations, difficulties, and pleasures of writing fiction. Zambra often features protagonists who are writers, and often these writers are seen to be writing the stories we are reading. In his earlier work, this metafictional element, though likable, occasionally seemed a bit modish and weightless, as if the young author were dutifully channelling his fellow-Chilean Roberto Bolaño (the obvious influence, gratefully studied) and Paul Auster (the more complicated influence, ultimately resisted). There’s a little too much of this kind of thing: “Anita’s husband was called Andrés, or Leonardo. Let’s agree that his name was Andrés and not Leonardo. Let’s agree that Anita was awake and Andrés half-asleep.”

Zambra’s first novel, “Bonsai,” translated into English by Carolina De Robertis and published here in 2008, holds stories-within-stories; it hides nestled simulacra, like those wallets in stores which contain fake credit cards. It tells about two young lovers, Julio and Emilia, who are briefly and passionately together, and about how, after their relationship ends, Emilia commits suicide. Julio and Emilia are brought together, in part, by their love of literature. They happen to read a story by Macedonio Fernández, about a couple who buy a small plant as a symbol of their love and, realizing that if the plant dies their relationship is symbolically doomed, decide to lose the little plant amid a lot of other identical plants. Julio and Emilia dislike the story—a sign, perhaps, that their own love is waning. Later, when, indeed, Julio is no longer living with Emilia, we see that he is working on a novel called “Bonsai,” which appears to be about a man who is mourning the death of the woman he loved in his youth. When this couple were together, they took care of a little plant, a bonsai. Julio’s novel is his homage to the memory of Emilia.