To call Multiple Choice, a book styled and read as a standardized test, a game would seem perverse. Standardized tests are often associated with an arduous, painful process, a stressful experience rather than something pleasurable or rewarding like a game. Not to mention, even though the core premise of multiple choice tests is one of choices, the effect seems to be the opposite. Standardized tests feel like a binding contract with an illusion of choice, you can pick your poison as long as you drink it.
A game does come up in Multiple Choice though, Alejandro Zamba brings it up when describing how people would figure out ways to cheat, game the system, play a game against the exam itself. It’s a little act of rebellion in the face of systemic conformity, but it’s also really the only choice that can be made.
Multiple Choice, as a work of fiction that’s formatted like an exam often presents the same dilemmas. It’s a work of expression that is operating within a form of oppression. It might structurally appear almost like a choose your own adventure book, or maybe a trivia game, but the choices here often don’t matter. Or they always matter, but they don’t change the truth. Or they do change the truth, but they were never choices to begin with. The book spirals around the contradictions that consume our personal relationships, ones that create bitter bigoted people, ones that create break-ups, as well as the larger contradictions at play—authoritarian systems masquerading as freedom.
While a standardized test is ironically quite universal as a symbol of conformity, Zamba is specific here. He intertwines his test with the Chilean Academic Apititude Test, and connects that with the Pinochet dictatorship. He weaves together critiques on form, with short stories on love and lust, with questions of national identity. And of course, how it all does seem to collapse into each other, the personal is political, the structural affects the individual’s mind.
Occasionally, all four answers on a question might seem equally wrong or irrelevant. What choice are we making when there are no good ones? Sometimes it’s even more explicit, Zambra presents a question and provides the same possible answers for all the choices. Is there even a choice anymore?
Sometimes you’re tasked with reading a short passage and choosing which parts are relevant, some of it, all of it, none of it? So often authority seeks the truth, but who’s truth? What happens when only some truths are told?
Do the tangents where the narrator starts reminiscing about the old days matter, or are they actually the most important parts? What does it mean to wield the power to censor, and what does it mean to live in a reality in which history is written and erased by those in power?