Written by María José Ferrada and translated by Elizabeth Bryer, HOW TO ORDER THE UNIVERSE fits the vastness of the unknown into a travel salesman’s suitcase.

Seven-year-old M is a precocious girl with an active imagination. She meditates on the cosmos and worships a deity she calls “The Great Carpenter,” who orders the universe following the fundamentals of sales. The only child of an emotionally absent mother and a traveling salesman father whom she calls D, M becomes enamored with her father’s career peddling Kramp products to hardware stores.

"HOW TO ORDER THE UNIVERSE is rife with wisdom, lists and wishes, and Ferrada unpacks the strangeness of M’s early years in poetic and simple prose."

M’s story takes on a strange, dreamlike quality as she strikes up an unusual partnership with her father. In exchange for a meager commission of dolls and puffer vests, she skips school to accompany D on his trips and softens his buyers into doing business with her “on-the-brink-of-tears” gaze.

On the road, M practices her most persuasive looks in the mirror and carries a toy nurse’s kit in lieu of a briefcase. She listens to lies told by strange men in coffee shops and blows smoke rings from the cigarettes that D slips her. As she becomes further entrenched in D’s world, she is introduced to two of his friends: S, a fellow salesman peddling perfumery, and E, an enigmatic cinephile who spends his spare time attempting to capture “ghosts” with the aid of his camera. Between day trips in their beaten-down Renault and negotiations for higher pay, M carves out a space for herself in the universe.

However, what initially reads as a story of unconventional father-daughter bonding is actually a coming-of-age tale that tracks M’s disillusionment as she matures into understanding against the backdrop of Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship.

With the strong, stunning honesty of a young mind, M describes the world as she sees it without realizing how much she does not see. As a little girl surrounded by problems that even the adults in her life struggle to cope with, M classifies out of necessity. She explains infidelity through the lens of the multiverse theory and defends child labor using a murky interpretation of Einstein’s theory of relativity. However, while M can wrestle most of the world around her into categories, it is telling what she leaves out. Things that cannot be explained are left off-screen: namely her mother’s depression and the violence that tears black holes through her neatly ordered reality. Thus, as she attempts to distill order from chaos using sales principles, it is up to the reader to discern the messy truth in her periphery.

HOW TO ORDER THE UNIVERSE is rife with wisdom, lists and wishes, and Ferrada unpacks the strangeness of M’s early years in poetic and simple prose. She juxtaposes the hopefulness of childhood against a dying sales industry and a hostile political regime with an uncommon nostalgia. Using M and her father’s system of typifying phenomena into “Probable” and “Improbable,” Ferrada has written a novel that would be classified as “Truly Improbable” in the very best way.