The Apartment on Calle Uruguay by Zachary Lazar

A - relatively short - novel about love, acceptance and reinventing yourself in exil circumstances, The Apartment on Calle Uruguay by Zachary Lazar is beautifully written. It is not easy to define what really means a beautiful prose, as the tastes may differ from one person to another, but for sure one knows how to recognize it. In my case, beautiful writing means a story that reminds us about the importance of humanity in us all, particularly kindness.

Christopher Bell, the narrator, is a painter fighting creative block, self-refugiated in a house near the forest, meets Anna, a journalist who fled Venezuela occasionally in the US, looking for some job opportunities. As she will return to Mexico, where her family took refuge, they realize, both of them, that they can give a chance to their story. 

It is a love story that grows slowly, but who was not meant to be exactly a love story. It is one of those random encounters that are able to be born only when both participants do give love a chance. Stories that in normal circumstances may sound impossible, they are happening under specific conditions. Exile, for instance, make as feel different. From outside, as a reader, you feel as you are the companion of the characters for a short amount of time, being left behind as soon as the story advances and eventually ends.

Both Christopher and Anna do try to accept their new identities, or are already familiar with the change of them. Christopher, for instance, is born in Israel and childood memories do return in his present life, he is but not one in ´the right way´ (whatever it may mean): ´I wouldn´t be alive if there wasn´t such a thing as Israel (...) But I´m not Israeli in a way anyone there would even recognize´. 

As he decides to follow Anna in Mexico, starting anew without necessarily a plan, he is facing his own choices, trying to find way to organise the past while distantly making sense of his new realities: ´Sometimes my life in Mexico didn´t feel real, just as mypast life in the US seldom felt real anymore´.

It was my first literary encounter with this writer, and I am sure not the only one. The Apartment on Calle Uruguay is a very fine kind of writing, kind and elegantly emotional. I wish I can write more such books.

Rating: 4.5 stars