Serious books about fatherhood are hard to come by; indeed, next to distinguished literary mothers such as Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, Jacqueline Rose, and Elena Ferrante, the male sex is beginning to look decidedly inarticulate. In his new, genre-blurring work Childish Literature, the Chilean novelist Alejandro Zambra seeks to right this imbalance. In doing so, he aims to correct the failings of prior male generations, who may have ‘tried, in their own ways, to teach us to be men’, but never quite ‘taught us to be fathers’.
Before he became one of Latin America’s most inventive prose writers, Zambra was an acclaimed poet and, like many poet-novelists, he treats narrative unities with healthy suspicion. The result is, like his last effort in prose, My Documents, a miscellany, whose first section veers from a second-person ‘diary’ addressed to his infant son, to verse, to lockdown memoir, to literary criticism, in a way that requires a good deal of patience of the reader. (A long passage about the French translation of a children’s picture book about a mole with a turd on its head proved particularly testing). But there is, Zambra assures us, a unifying reason for this formlessness. Our author claims to be writing in ‘a state of attachment’, moved to a dreamy receptivity by the encounter with new life. Sure enough, this is a book which, when it works, does so mysteriously, by faithfully relaying the unpredictable wanderings of a young father’s mind.
Still, Childish Literature works best when this free association abates slightly, when the vignettes grow longer and Zambra’s talents as a storyteller are allowed to breathe.
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