Here is the Chilean writer, Alejandro Zambra, on first names for children: “Last names are prose. First names are poetry. There are people who spend their whole lives reading the inescapable novel of their own surname. But first names contain latent whims, intentions, prejudices, possibilities, emotions. And they’re nearly always the only text that the mother and father write together.”
Zambra’s focus in Childish Literature, translated by Megan McDowell (Fitzcarraldo, 205pp, £12.99), is firmly on the father in the writing couple. Memoirs of motherhood are notable for producing classics such as Anne Enright’s Making Babies or Marie Darrieusecq’s The Baby. Fatherhood, on the other hand, is a fallow field almost entirely colonised by the debilitating bonhomie of the self-help book (Zambra reports struggling through a voluminous manual whose genius recommendation was “Be sensitive!”).
Zambra is peerless in his sensitive exploration of the condition of fatherhood – the joys, the complications, the surprises – where being a father is less of a given than something to be earned. All fathers, he argues, are at some level stepfathers, their status endlessly renegotiated in their children’s eyes. Part of the negotiation relates to fathers dealing with fathers. A number of the pieces in Childish Literature deal with Zambra’s Oedipal spats with his own father. There is something of David Sedaris in Zambra’s candidly comic but heartfelt description of the bearlike nuzzling that often passes for male communication in families.
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Becoming a father teaches Zambra much about what it is to be a writer and a reader. As he reads – over and over and over again – a story to his son about a mole with poop on his head, he senses that it is the unfolding, never the ending, that constitutes the magic of the tale. Writing increasingly appears to Zambra as an extension of play, the adult refuge for the imaginative possibilities of childhood.
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He does worry that leaving a record of his son’s childhood means denying him that “mysterious childhood amnesia” which “allows us to forget all the factors that could neutralise the severity with which we judge our parents”. Zambra’s readers, conversely, will not readily forget a work that rescues the extraordinary adventure of fatherhood from the box-ticking dutifulness of parenting manuals.
One well-known conduit through which the world of the child can enter the realm of the adult is the animal fable. In works by authors from Aesop to George Orwell, talking animals have repeatedly ventriloquised moral dilemmas for grown-up humans. Toon Tellegen’s The Hedgehog’s Dilemma, translated by David Colmer (Pushkin Press, 171pp, £9.99), deals with a hedgehog who is a martyr to indecision. He wants to write a letter inviting the animals of the forest to visit him, but the sending of the letter is endlessly deferred as he fusses over the wording, his motives, and the eventual consequences of his invitation being acted upon.
In the absence of actual visits, the hedgehog imagines all manner of animals paying a call on him, from a giraffe to a may bug. At the very end of the tale, the hedgehog thinks of the expression, “See you soon,” and he reflects that “They were the most beautiful words he knew”. The problem for the hedgehog is that he is not likely to see anybody very soon. Loneliness is his constant companion.
Tellegen’s book – a bestseller in his native Netherlands – can be seen as, among other things, a sustained reflection on the loneliness epidemic which afflicts more and more societies. The hedgehog is aware of the need for human contact but his obsessive self-doubt and accumulating insecurities mean he readily self-sabotages his attempts to woo others. Locked away in the digital cages of screens and ear buds, human animals can find it increasingly difficult to enter the impenetrable forest of actual human connection.
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The hedgehog, in his fretful insecurity, is less an oddity than an allegory for the relentless thinning out of in-person social life. Tellegen is not, however, a po-faced fabulist. He writes with wit and verve about his gallery of animal characters and uses irony to great effect in parading the all-too-familiar vanities and foibles of his recognisably human cast. A cantankerous snail and much put-upon tortoise, for example, are effective foils for Tellegen’s gentle wit. The Hedgehog’s Dilemma, beautifully illustrated by Annemarie van Haeringen, is a nursery tale for an adult world increasingly starved of non-algorithmic interaction.
The nature of interaction in a troubled space is at the heart of Gaëlle Bélem’s absorbing There’s a Monster Behind the Door, translated by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtita Saint-Loubert (Bullaun, 164pp, €14.95). The novel is set on the island of La Réunion, a French territory in the Indian Ocean, and home to the author, Bélem.
If tropical islands have been a staple of tourist fantasy, Bélem is forensic in her demolition of the sentimental cliches surrounding her island home and unstinting in her detailing of the toxic afterlife of enslavement and abandonment. Centred on the birth and coming of age of the unnamed daughter of the Dessaintes family, Bélem details the innumerable obstacles to the child’s flourishing, based on her gender, class and race.
The Dessaintes are a tropical take on the Thénardier clan in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables: brutal, avaricious, utterly broken by their own blighted childhoods. Their daughter’s interest in reading and education is regarded with deep suspicion and outright hostility. She struggles to free herself from an all-pervasive fatalism that treats hope as a malignant tumour to be eradicated. Taboos and a self-protective silence mean that the intolerable is routinely tolerated so that the men, in particular, see no reason to change their abusive behaviours.
Bélem’s writing is inhabited by a fierce wit which produces moments of high comedy in her tale of frustrated longings and human desolation, as in her acid portraits of tie-wearing evangelicals and unscrupulous island quacks. When she writes about the colonial legacy of slavery – “the suicides, the psychotic disorders, the infanticides, the pennyroyal abortions” – there is a sense in which island histories in the imperial world order commingle and resonate across time and space.
It seems appropriate that an Irish publishing house, Bullaun, specialising in translation, should bring this novel to the attention of the English-speaking world. Fleetwood and Saint-Loubert’s deft and sensitive translation will undoubtedly help to bring this work to the wide readership it deserves.
Whether the high-born Marquis de Sade deserved any readers at all was not even a subject for discussion for many years after his death in 1814, as his work was universally banned. His writings would belatedly become the toast of the European avant-garde in the 1960s and 1970s, when critics such as Roland Barthes and literary and creative artists including Angela Carter and Pier Paolo Pasolini looked to the French writer and polemicist for subversive treatments of the nature of philosophical creation, of the aesthetics of fascism or of misrepresentations of female sexuality.
Gothic Tales, translated by the late Margaret Crosland (Pushkin, 204pp, £9.99), is a collection of shorter and longer pieces by the French author, and provides a useful introduction to the range of his writings. Sade was the unloved child of the French Enlightenment but his texts owed much to the argumentative feistiness of Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot. In the long short stories in this collection such as Eugénie de Franval, Florville and Courval or Emilie de Tourville, little time is wasted on elaborate character descriptions or meticulous scene setting. Sade is impatient to get to the rhetorical set pieces where characters lay out their arguments on the nature of vice, virtue or the social organisation of French society.
What saves Sade from the predictable dullness of the preacher is the way in which the corrupt get the best lines in his stories but are almost invariably outed by their appalling behaviour, their plausible words debased by the manipulative criminality of their acts. Sade’s virtuous heroines are less the victims of their own illusions than they are casualties of a system that constrains their movements and sources of pleasure so rigidly that they fall prey to forms of abuse nourished and justified by religious and social hypocrisy.
One of Sade’s stories, The Husband Who Played Priest, is subtitled A Provençal Tale and there is a sense in which, in his overriding attention to plot and moral, Sade is primarily a peddler of philosophical folktales. His Gothic storytelling has an unnerving relevance in the contemporary moment when political strongmen the world over are pressing language into forms of abuse and discrimination that would have been all too familiar to the French aristocrat.
Michael Cronin is Professor of French at Trinity College Dublin
