As familial relationships go, the one between fathers and sons has received inordinate attention throughout literature. Alejandro Zambra (Multiple Choice), a Chilean author based in Mexico, considers this dynamic in Childish Literature, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell. This excellent book collects essays, two stories, and a poem about father-son bonds. The essays focus on Zambra's relationships with his own father and with his young son. As Zambra writes, the term "children's literature" is condescending and redundant "because all literature, at its core, is childish," an observation meant as a compliment. He demonstrates that point in these pieces, starting with the titular work, a series of vignettes about his son's first year, when the baby is "relentlessly new."
Most of these pieces explore the joys and frustrations of that bond, all of it related in endearingly poetic prose. "French for Beginners" focuses on the boy's desire to read a French-language book about a mole. In "Screen Time," Zambra recalls how he and his wife surrendered to parental exhaustion and "lowered their standards and became habitual viewers of extremely mediocre series." "Blue-Eyed Muggers" tells parallel tales, one about Zambra's son's weekly phone calls with his grandfather and the other about the time 14-year-old Zambra rescued his father from robbers. And among the collection's two stories is "The Kid with No Dad," which portrays a friendship between two boys in Chile, one of whom does not know his father. Themes of memory, forgetting, and, most notably, the value of comfort permeate these exceptional works. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer