Chilean poet Alejandro Zambra, in Childish Literature, writes a collection of poems, essays and tales exploring the ups and downs of fatherhood especially orbiting around the theme of fathers and sons. Written in a state of attachment or under the influence of fatherhood, Childish Literature is an eclectic guide to rookie parents, revealing how the birth and growth of a child changes not only the present and the future, but also reshapes our perceptions of the past. 

 He ponders his unpreparedness: “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”.

“Trip and Crawl” describes a magic mushroom trip that ends with the tenderest of paternal realisations: “My son was sleeping soundly as I told him, with my eyes, not to ever crawl, not to ever walk, that it wasn’t necessary: I could carry him in my arms his whole life”.

There are poems about being kept awake by his newborn, about his son learning to walk, and about the boy refusing to hit a piñata. “The kid with no dad” is a short story about a friendship that is broken and then repaired. “Skyscrapers” offers a glimpse of an aspiring writer’s uneasy relationship with the father that he resents and seeks approval from.

“An introduction to football sadness” explores that most unperishable of bonds – shared loyalty to a football team: “For many of us, that part of our paternal inheritance was only one we never questioned.”

In “Late lessons in fly-fishing” Zambra reflects movingly on his own father’s late-life interest- one that the author himself disparaged, opening up a rift that, now a father himself, he wishes to heal.

“The joyous and necessarily dopey satisfaction of watching a child learn to stand up or say his first words”. 

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. Zambra shows how children shield adults from despondency, self-absorption and  the tyrannies of chronological time. A father’s 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 of recent time.

Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra, Translated by Megan McDowell, Fitzcarraldo £12.99, 216 pages