How do we write about the singular experience of parenthood? Written in a ‘state of attachment’, or ‘under the influence’ of fatherhood, Childish Literature is an eclectic guide for novice parents, showing how the birth and growth of a child changes not only the present and the future, but also reshapes our perceptions of the past. Shifting from moving dispatches from his son’s first year of existence, to a treatise on ‘football sadness’, to a psychedelic narrative where a man tries, mid-magic mushroom trip, to re-learn the subtle art of crawling, this latest work from Alejandro Zambra shows how children shield adults from despondency, self-absorption and the tyrannies of chronological time. At once a chronicle of fatherhood, a letter to a child and a work of fiction, Childish Literature is the latest, virtuosic addition to the oeuvre of one of the most exciting Latin American writers in recent decades.
Childish Literature
Translated by Megan McDowell
French paperback with flap, 216 pages
Published 24 October 2024
Childish Literature
Translated by Megan McDowell
CHILDISH LITERATURE
0.
With you in my arms, I see the shadow we cast together on the wall for the first time. You’ve been alive for twenty minutes.
Your mother’s eyelids lower, but she doesn’t want to sleep. She rests her eyes for just a few seconds.
‘Sometimes newborns forget to breathe,’ a friendly buzzkill of a nurse informs us.
I wonder if she says it like that every day. With the same words. With the same sad cautionary tone.
Your little body breathes, though: even in the dimly lit hospital, your breathing is visible. But I want to hear it, hear you, and my own wheezing breath won’t let me. And my noisy heart keeps me from hearing yours.
Throughout the night, every two or three minutes I hold my breath to make sure you’re breathing. It’s such a reasonable superstition, the most reasonable of all: stop breathing so your child will breathe.
1.
I walk through the hospital as though searching for cracks left by the last earthquake. I think horrible thoughts, but I still manage to imagine the scars that someday you will proudly show off towards the end of summer.
14.
Your brief fourteen-day life wears the word childhood like a roomy poncho. But I like how exaggerated it sounds. Fourteen days old – the word old looks so strange there, when you’re still so relentlessly new.
25.
You cry and I show up. What a rip-off. Maybe our fathers took those first rejections too much to heart.
You don’t prefer me, but you get used to my company. And I get used to sleeping when you sleep. The rhythm of intermittent naps reminds me of hundreds of long bus rides dozing on the way to grade school or university, to attend classes where I went right on dozing off. Or those delicious, furtive catnaps that allowed me to endure a working life.
Suddenly, I’m fifteen years old and it’s midnight and I’m studying something that might be chemistry or algebra or phonology and I’m out of cigarettes and it’s a problem, because I smoke a lot in my dreams. I wake up when some shy dogs start their concert of barks and a neighbour starts hammering; perhaps he’s hanging a portrait of his own son on the wall, and that’s why he doesn’t care about waking mine.
But you go on sleeping against my chest, and you seem to be even more deeply asleep, seriously asleep. I have no idea what time it is, and I don’t care. Eleven in the morning, three in the afternoon. That’s how the tired but happy days pass, alternating with the happy but tired days and the happy but happy days.
31.
The birth of a child heralds a far-reaching future in which we will not fully participate. Julio Ramón Ribeyro summed it up well: ‘The tooth that comes in for them is the one that falls out for us; the inch they grow is the one that we shrink; the lights they acquire are the ones extinguished in us; what they learn, we forget; and the year added for them is the one subtracted for us.’
It’s a beautiful thought, whose turbulent side, however, has unhinged millions of men. I’m thinking of fathers from past generations, though it’s ridiculous to presume things have changed. I have met men who practise fatherhood with lucidity, humour and humility, but I have also seen dear friends who seemed to have their hearts well placed turn away from their children to indulge in a desperate and clichéd recovery of their youth. And there are also plenty of fathers who confront the death drive by burdening their kids with missions and commandments, with the explicit or veiled intention of using their children to further their own interrupted dreams.
What I find striking, in any case, is the almost absolute lack of a tradition. Since all human beings – I assume – have been born, it would seem natural for us to be experts in matters of child-rearing, but it turns out that we know very little, especially men, who sometimes seem like those cheerful students who show up to class blissfully unaware that there’s a test. While women passed on to their daughters the asphyxiating imperative of maternity, we grew up pampered and ineffectual and even humming along to ‘Billie Jean’. Our fathers tried, in their own ways, to teach us to be men, but they never taught us to be fathers. And their fathers didn’t teach them either. And so on.
(…)
‘What a rare and wonderful experience, to read a writer of such brilliance, wit and style as Alejandro Zambra on the subjects of fatherhood and childhood. I relished every page of this beautiful, surprising book.’
— Mark O’Connell, author of A Thread of Violence
‘Charming, protean, ebullient and precise, this book transforms and grows almost as much as the parents and child at the centre of the book. A wonder.’
— Karan Mahajan, author of The Association of Small Bombs
‘Hopeful, funny and full of wisdom. A meditation on fatherhood by one of our most perceptive writers.’
— Tara Westover, author of Educated
‘Whenever Alejandro Zambra brings out a new book, I’m excited to read it. The playful intelligence of his exuberant imagination, along with his sharp-eyed, poignant, poetic observations of everyday life, are unmatched. On every page there’ll be something that makes me laugh out loud, no matter if what’s being narrated is devastating or – like this new book – luminously tender. In Childish Literature, Zambra’s account of fatherhood is so generous, self-deprecating and infectious.’
— Francisco Goldman, author of Monkey Boy
‘Every beat and pattern of being alive becomes revelatory and bright when narrated by Alejandro Zambra. He is a modern wonder.’
— Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch
‘When I read Zambra I feel like someone’s shooting fireworks inside my head.’
— Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive
‘The most talked-about writer to come out of Chile since Bolaño.’
— New York Times
‘Strikingly original.’
— James Wood, New Yorker
Alejandro Zambra was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1975. He is the author of Chilean Poet, Multiple Choice, Not to Read, My Documents, Ways of Going Home, The Private Lives of Trees and Bonsai. In Chile, among other honours, he has won the National Book Council Award for best novel three times. In English, he has won the English PEN Award and the PEN/O. Henry Prize and was a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. In 2023 he won the Manuel Rojas Ibero-American Prize for the totality of his oeuvre. He has also won the Prince Claus Award (Holland) and received a Cullman Centre Fellowship from the New York Public Library. His books have been translated into twenty languages and his stories have been published in the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney’s Quarterly and Harper’s, among other publications. He has taught creative writing and Hispanic literature for fifteen years and currently lives in Mexico City.
Megan McDowell’s translations have won the National Book Award, the English PEN Award, the Premio Valle-Inclán, the Shirley Jackson Award and two O. Henry Prizes, among others, and have been nominated for the International Booker Prize four times. In 2020, she won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. She lives in Santiago, Chile.
