Review by Booklist Review
Clean is the opposite of what readers will feel when they finish this novel by Chilean author Zerán. Domestic worker Estela García moved to the big city to work, aiming to make her adored mother's life easier in their hardscrabble coastal village. She ends up with an upper-class couple she calls señor and señora. What this couple values is appearances. An unreliable narrator who self-medicates with pills from the señora's stash, Estela keeps the household running, everyone fed and clothed, and cleans up every mess; she is the silent witness to the adults' secrets, a marginalized and dehumanized member of the household. Estela's efforts to find connection and affection are tragically, painfully doomed, her links to her own family and home stretched thin and broken. When the couple's young daughter dies, Estela ends up in an interrogation room as emotionally sterile as her employers' house, where she tells her story to an unseen panel of judges behind a one-way mirror, which becomes the reader's perspective. While Zerán's uncomfortable, fascinating, lovely, and affecting novel is set in contemporary Santiago, Chile, Hughes' splendid translation assures it will resonate in many more places where people live with the alienation and superficiality of late-stage capitalism.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Chilean writer Zerán (The Remainder) delivers a propulsive story of class differences in Santiago. After Julia, the young daughter of a successful doctor and lawyer, is found dead, having drowned in the family's pool, Estela, their longtime maid, is brought in for questioning. Sitting in an interrogation room, Estela recounts her decision to leave her home in her mid-30s to find work in the capital and divulges information about her employers. She describes stumbling upon them having sex in the dining room and retreating when they notice her, after which their cries get much louder. In addition to cleaning, she's forced to double as a nanny for the "fragile" Julia, and she learns secrets about the family, such as the mother's use of birth control pills and antidepressants. Zerán employs Estela as the novel's lone narrator, smartly crafting a version of events that suggests the maid's innocence, even as Estela admits to bottling her rage, leaving the reader to wonder whether Julia's death was accidental, a suicide, or murder. Though Estela's recollections become repetitive as the novel's climax nears, Zerán keeps up the momentum with short chapters and Estela's appealingly snappy voice (she frequently tells her interrogators to "write this down"). This is bursting with intrigue. (Oct.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A maid tells the story of a child's death in a series of meanders. On the first page of Trabucco Zerán's novel, the narrator, Estela García, offers a deal to the people who may or may not be on the other side of a mirrored glass pane: "I'm going to tell you a story, and when I get to the end, when I stop talking, you're going to let me out of here." Estela, it seems, is waiting to be interrogated in connection with the death of a girl, Julia, the daughter of a couple for whom Estela has worked as a housemaid for seven years. What follows is Estela's account of her time as a domestic, from her responding to a want ad--"Housemaid wanted, presentable, full time"--to her experience working for the couple, whom she refers to as "the señor and señora." Estela clearly resents her bosses--he's a doctor, she's a lawyer, and both are condescending snobs, chiding their employee for every oversight and expecting her to essentially raise Julia for them. Estela is painfully conscious of the class differences between her and the couple, and she disdains their family, "an unhappy little girl, a woman keeping up appearances and a man keeping count: of every minute, every peso, every conquest." Estela talks for more than 250 pages, eventually getting to the story of Julia's death, which is of course tragic but also (perhaps by design) anticlimactic. Trabucco Zerán has crafted an interesting narrative setup, but she can't quite make it work--Estela's frequent asides to her apparent interrogators ("Did I tell you about this?" "Do you see what I'm getting at?") quickly wears thin, and the suspense never really materializes. Her treatment of the theme of class differences is shallow, and the character development just isn't there. A novel that can't get itself off the ground. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
