Clean
by Alia Trabucco Zerán
Translated by Sophie Hughes
In several Gothic novels, servants—silent witnesses and depositories of family secrets—played a key role in propelling the narrative and conveying social commentary. While the era of “servants” in middle-class households may be a thing of the past, their place—in both real life and literature—has been taken by maids working for wealthier families.
Which brings me to Clean by Chilean author Alia Trabucco Zerán, her second novel, soon to be available in an English translation by Sophie Hughes (who also translated Zerán’s previous works—her debut novel The Remainder and the true-crime non-fiction work When Women Kill).
The narrator of the novel is Estela, a woman in her forties from the rural south of Chile, who has spent seven years working as a maid in Santiago. Her employers are a well-to-do couple—a successful doctor and his lawyer wife—parents to a young daughter born shortly after Estela began working for them. We realise quite early on that the girl is now dead, but the circumstances of that tragedy are only revealed (and then, only partially and unreliably) toward the end of the novel. The narrative takes the form of a defiant confession of sorts, narrated by Estela—probably to the police or other authorities, but possibly also to an imaginary audience among which readers take their place.
As the story unfolds,
the death of the girl becomes an almost marginal detail in a broader tale about
a family that appears picture-perfect but is unravelling behind the scenes—just
as Estela’s own sanity seems to be collapsing. All this plays out against the
backdrop of civil protests and unrest, such that Estela’s story becomes a
symbol of class oppression.
Clean is, at one level,
an incisive psychological study of its characters; at another, a raging
political statement. All this is couched within the trappings of a domestic
thriller, with elements of the Gothic and “home invasion” genres. A brief and
punchy read.
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