SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The death of a little girl is at the center of Alia Trabucco Zeran's new novel "Clean." Estela, the housekeeper for the couple whose daughter has died, finds herself in an interrogation room talking, it seems, about everything but the death, how she was just the woman who did the ironing, watered the plants, scrubbed the skid marks from the toilet bowl and who learned how to plait the girl's hair. Is Estela digressing, confessing or settling scores? "Clean" is the latest novel from Alia Trabucco Zeran. She joins us now from Santiago, Chile. Thanks so much for being with us.
ALIA TRABUCCO ZERAN: Thank you, Scott.
SIMON: You write at one point the defining feature of a tragedy is that we already know how it will end. Does that make a novel more difficult to engage people?
TRABUCCO ZERAN: I'm not sure. In "Clean," you know from the second paragraph that a girl has died, and that might lure you in to know who did it, what happened. And that's the strategy. Not only mine, but that's Estela's strategy to have you and the readers hear something else, to hear about her own life, which we might not want to hear if it wasn't for that fact. So in a way, it's a trap (laughter).
SIMON: Is Estela talking so much 'cause she's trying to bury something that implicates her?
TRABUCCO ZERAN: I would say Estela is talking so much because she finally has a chance to speak and perhaps to be heard. In that sense, she's breaking a silence, a self-imposed silence, but also the fact that she has always been silenced.
SIMON: Yeah. As the housekeeper, she sees most - a little bit of everything, doesn't she?
TRABUCCO ZERAN: Totally. In a sense, she's, like, the perfect spy, isn't she? She sees and hears everything, but it's really not seen or heard, and that actually gives her a lot of power. We can see through her eyes what's happening with that family.
SIMON: Estela's had no experience with children when the little girl is born, and the couple seems to think, oh, she - well, sure, she'll be the nanny. How does Estela feel when she looks at that child?
TRABUCCO ZERAN: I would say the relationship between Estela and Julia - that's the name of the little girl - is in the center of the story because there's love there, but there's also tension, there's also anger. There's also a class issue. And all of that complex set of emotions is something that we're, as readers, I think, not very used to read.
SIMON: Well, help us understand the class issue. Estela's from the countryside, right?
TRABUCCO ZERAN: She is. She's from the south of Chile, and she migrates from there to Santiago, the capital, to work for this posh, middle-upper-class family. She's a live-in maid, so sleeping where she works from Monday to Sunday. And, of course, there's a class issue there working for others so that others can accomplish their life project while she can't.
SIMON: It occurred to me at one point if we readers got to know this couple in a different way, well, we might like them a lot. The husband's a doctor. He helps care for people. The wife's a lawyer who's breaking barriers for women. They're trying to provide a good life for their daughter, aren't they?
TRABUCCO ZERAN: I really like that you say this because I wasn't trying to write a novel where there would be this evil couple mistreating the maid. They're, like, a normal couple, so we might like them. And yet they also have this woman who lives there and works for them and small little acts of violence day after day, year after year, that create tension. That's what the novel is also about.
SIMON: Acts of violence like what?
TRABUCCO ZERAN: Like, for example, not letting her wash her clothes with their clothes in the same washing machine - microviolences that amount to a greater violence, which has to do with the fact that we live in societies that are very, very deeply divided class-wise. So some people can actually accomplish their life dreams, while others are actually cleaning for them. It's like Camus said, and I quote him at the beginning of the book, "it's a question of which will clean up the other."
SIMON: Yeah. The television is on in a number of scenes.
TRABUCCO ZERAN: It is.
SIMON: What is Estela seeing about what's going on in her country, in her world, our world?
TRABUCCO ZERAN: Yes, in our world, really. It's a very claustrophobic novel, right? Almost everything happens inside the house. The protagonist is a tremendously isolated character. She's radically alone, and her job is not only repetitive but also invisible. But she's not alone in that position, and there are thousands of other invisible human beings like her. And that's what we see through the television, protests and discontent that also merge with her own anger and her discontent.
SIMON: Would anyone's life stand up to the scrutiny of a housekeeper?
TRABUCCO ZERAN: Probably not. And I think that's fascinating because if we go through literature, many, many times, maids are just portrayed as being very thankful of their lives or their employers, and this is a different angle. In that sense, the fact that she's kind of spying and showing us the side that we might not want to see of that family is also making us feel uncomfortable. And I really think that's important, to see that other angle beyond thankfulness. You see anger, and I think anger is a politically relevant emotion.
SIMON: Why were you determined to write this story about the death of a little girl from the perspective of the housekeeper?
TRABUCCO ZERAN: To be perfectly honest, I didn't think I was going to write this novel. I was supposed to write something else. But I had written a previous book. It's called "When Women Kill," and one chapter of that book examines the case of Maria Teresa Alfaro, a domestic worker who murdered her employer's children in the '60s. And when I was writing that essay, which actually examines female transgression, I realized there was something about her, about Alfaro, beyond the crime that interested me. Her work, her isolation, but above all, it was the voice, and so the voice just wouldn't leave me alone, and I had to write the book.
SIMON: "Clean" is the new novel from Alia Trabucco Zeran, and it's translated by Sophie Hughes. Thank you so much for being with us.
TRABUCCO ZERAN: Thank you, Scott. A pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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