The saddest thing is that Chilean author Alia Trabucco Zerán does have some talent. Unlike its neighboring countries, Chile doesn’t have much by way of literature, and one doesn’t want to see a literary gift that finally cropped up in the country go to waste. Unfortunately, Trabucco Zerán got an MFA at a woke US school. And now she’s trying to squeeze her talented writing into the Procrustean bed of social-justice dogma.
Limpia is narrated by a live-in maid of a professional couple in Santiago. She’s a resentful, first-level kind of person, and it’s interesting to see her try to make sense of the lives of people who are less primitive than she is. But Trabucco Zerán can’t leave well enough alone and tries to massage the story into a tedious class struggle narrative. As a result, the novel ends up being a lot more boring than it needed to be.
Trabucco Zerán is young for a writer, and one does hope that she stops writing for woke, rich Americans and starts noticing her own large Spanish-speaking audience. Of all the ills that the US inflicted on Latin America, the woke garbage is the worst, and that’s in spite of stiff competition.
Clarissa's Blog 