Now that the book is out, your role as a writer obviously changes. It’s no longer just you and the book. You are now engaged in its promotion and a wider discourse. Do you like that aspect of being a writer? I mean, even this, right now, this interview, is it annoying?

No, I wouldn’t say annoying, but unnatural. Talking with people is to me one of the biggest pleasures of life. Interviews seem like a conversation but they are kind of its opposite. In a conversation I would like to know everything about you, for starters, but that’s not how interviews work. And English interviews like this one are considerably harder because I never really studied your language. When I participate in readings I’m really imitating Megan McDowell’s English.

And of course books speak for themselves. They are not like newborn babies. They are like kids who’ve grown up and left home. You were raising them for a long time, and during that time you really wanted to talk about them. You were asking questions and maybe your friends grew a little bored of hearing your thoughts and anxieties or whatever. But then the book is out. If I do interviews, it is because I think it is a way of creating some kind of company for them. And yet I’m really aware that you could spoil your book by talking about it, like an overprotective father. Because you want your kids to come back home, to have lunch with you on Sundays, even though they don’t belong to you anymore. I mean, this is really why you publish. You publish because you feel at a certain point they don’t belong to you anymore.

It always feels a little stupid to publish a book. You know, it’s like, ‘read me now – I have something to say to the world!’. And this book in particular is the closest to what is called non-fiction, though its sense of ‘fiction’ is something I still want to preserve—

—But I can’t think of a publisher that makes the fiction/non-fiction distinction as sharply as Fitzcarraldo does. They could hardly be more black and white – or blue and white, as it were… How do you feel about Childish Literature being packaged as fiction?

But if you look closely you would find that this is not the usual Fitzcarraldo Yves Kein’s blue. It is a little lighter. Very little. I’m kidding. Actually I love that Fitzcarraldo chose this book to be blue. At least two pieces, ‘The Boy with No Dad’ and ‘Skyscrapers’, are fictional and still they belong to this book in a very natural way. When my son was born I began to have these new thoughts about friendship, love and education and that’s where those stories came from. So it makes sense that a little blue tints the white. Some people understand fiction and non-fiction in terms of what is true and what is not. I’m really against that idea, since it weakens what fiction means to the world. Its power, its necessity, the very special and precious kind of knowledge it allows. Saying that fiction is untrue, that it is something of a lie, is as imprecise as saying that a song is a lie, that a joke is a lie, that a painting is a lie.

I’d be interested to hear about what you make of another question of genre, the difference between children’s and adult’s books. In Childish Literature you seem to enjoy toying with that distinction. There’s a funny passage where your editor tells you over a drink that you should just write actual children’s books, says it’s a better fit for your style, then calls you the next morning, hungover, to apologise. It’s funny because of how embarrassed she is and how unembarrassed you are.

[Laughs] She wasn’t my editor, she was someone external who genuinely wanted me to write books for children. And she was actually trying to convince me. But we were drinking Nebbiolo, so she went with the flow. It was funny, you know, she was in front of me saying your books are childish, and you have to go in that direction.

In a way she’s right. I do agree there is something childish about my style. My idea of ​​style has changed and I hope it continues to change, but from the beginning I have sought as much simplicity as possible without sacrificing complexity. Well, not from the beginning. In the very beginning I was looking for absolute weirdness and unintelligibility. But that changed a lot. At seventeen I came across Pound’s early works and his famous dos and don’ts, and although I didn’t obey them completely, they did shape my style. They reset it. All of a sudden I was back at a starting point. I’ve come to think that we writers are like students just repeating the same grade over and over again.

It is really incredible how impossible family relationships are to resolve.

There is a giant divide between people who read books and think that literature is important, and people who don’t give a shit about literature. I am really interested in people who don’t care about books because those are my people, that is where I came from. I even like to think that perhaps some people will pick up and read this new book by mistake. Like, ‘Oh, there is a book about fatherhood.’ And they think: ‘I’m interested in that but I don’t like books that much.’ Then they read this book and it’s not exactly what they expected, and they love it or hate because of that.

You think people might misunderstand the title? As if it’s more instructional?

Maybe. Who knows. I’m speaking English now, don’t take me too seriously. Anyway that might happen more in Spanish, because the original title is more playful and equivocal, it’s like a little trap. In fact it’s my second book in a row with an equivocal title. Chilean Poet always gets shelved in the poetry section and, well, Bonsai, The Private Lives of Trees, they also get put in the wrong sections… I swear it’s not totally intentional. But in Spanish, literatura infantil is the name of the category: ‘books for children’. So in bookshops, you see signs that say literatura infantil, and at the same time the word infantil means infantile, childish. So the title is more parodic and ambiguous in Spanish. It’s a little more disconcerting, because maybe you’d expect it to be about books for children, and at the same time infantil is often used as an insult, like when a goalkeeper makes an incredible mistake. I think Megan read the spirit of this book masterfully.

So the English title is more teasing. It doesn’t leave as much room for that double-meaning.

Yes, it’s a choice. It could have been called A Book for Children or Children’s Literature. But it would have lost a certain, well—

—An edge.

Yeah. I like the English title very much.

Me too. In a funny way, this reminds me of something Martin Amis said. He was once asked whether he’d ever write children’s books and his reply was, only if he had a serious brain injury. It’s classic Martin Amis because it’s kind of witty but also kind of embarrassing. In fact, it suggests an arrogance and insecurity. That to write children’s books would mean stooping below his high-brow literary calibre, and—

—Did he really say that? I would have liked to read a children’s book by Martin Amis. Right after our conversation I’m going to ask ChatGPT to write a Martin Amis children’s book [laughs].

I think it would break. That’s the first question that would break ChatGPT.

Yeah and we could ask for the style of illustration that he’d have hated the most.

But you clearly don’t have the same insecurity he does. You seem to be interested with what it means for certain kinds of literature to be judged as infantile, without any suggestion of that being insulting.

Yeah, I had a good disposition towards books for children, but I didn’t have the experience of reading those books every day until my son was born.

You didn’t? You weren’t reading children’s books as a child?

No, not at all. There were none in my house. They weren’t there to be read. I mean, I had some idea of, I don’t know, the classic tales. But I didn’t have the books. I wasn’t told a story before bedtime. It was more like: ‘You. Why are you awake? Why are you awake!’ [Laughs] ‘It’s 11 pm!’

But was that just your family? Or was everyone in your suburb the same?

I tend to think that other families were different, but we lived in a dictatorship and books were not precisely the order of the day. Pinochet’s dictatorship considered them dangerous. Anyway, in my case, the whole idea of literature was somehow related to the fact that my parents had nothing to do with it. So when I became crazy for literature, it was something I was proud of on my own. It was to do with me, and only me. Still, literature was somehow present. I had a grandmother on my mother’s side who was such a literary person, except I never saw her reading a book. But she was always telling us stories. And she wanted all of her grandchildren to keep diaries, she was always giving us copybooks and pencils as presents. And telling jokes and singing. When I see musicals I always think of her because she was the kind of person that could start singing at any moment.

She was the survivor of an earthquake in 1939 that devastated her city, Chillán Viejo, so she moved to Santiago when she was, like, 20. Nobody was ever sure how old she was, because she didn’t say. We were always like, ‘Happy birthday’ – without the age. We never knew how many candles to put on the cake. But the earthquake was when she was nineteen or eighteen and all her family died. She saw a wall that had fallen against her mother, and she was three metres away from her. Mother, father, siblings, all died except one of her brothers who saved her from the wreckage. So when she was with us she told us stories, not written stories, but memories. Memories of her youth, funny stories. A little like some of The Canterbury Tales. Gossip. And there was always a point where she remembered that the people she was talking about were dead, and she’d start crying and then laughing again, because all those stories were really funny. There was always this collision between laughter and tears.

Laughter and tears. To me that’s completely your style. In one sentence, you – or, in fact, the reader – can swing from one to the other. And it seems effortless, but I imagine it’s more difficult than it looks. It’s as if you’re always writing in a calm, gentle, good humour. Which I don’t imagine is the case – I mean, I can’t imagine that’s the case – surely not… especially with your son on the scene. 

Well, I like what you say. I’m not saying being a father is easy, of course, the world is too painfully stupid and violent and disheartening. But to me, being that particular kid’s father has been the most revitalising and revealing and natural thing I’ve ever experienced. It’s been harder being a teacher, a writer, a couple, a son… This book comes from the feeling that raising a kid and writing literature aren’t very different activities. When you are playing with your kid you lose a sense of time, just like when you write. It’s like, if a kid is around, you are witnessing a professional of playing. A kid’s job is playing. And they play the whole day and they play seriously. You cannot say to a kid in the middle of a game, ‘but we are just playing. Don’t be mad, this is a game.’ They would probably answer, ‘this is not a game.’ It is really beautiful. And as adults, we learn to stop playing. And in a way, when you write, you have to unlearn that. Have you been around kids? You have a younger brother, a younger sister?

Yes, though they’re not that young any more.

One day they just learn to tell jokes. When they’re three, four, five years old they just get that there is this thing that creates laughter. And they obviously want to imitate that. Like, wow, I’m gonna tell a joke. So they tell a joke and they fail. They fail because it is hard to tell a joke, but people around laugh. Obviously. But they don’t laugh because of the joke. They laugh because of the fact that the kid wants to tell a joke. That’s what’s tender and moving and funny. Unless you’re stupid, in which case you’ll start correcting them. Like, ‘this is not a proper joke. This is the structure of a joke. The punchline.’ No. You don’t do that. You just let them discover by trial and error that the joke isn’t exactly working. And eventually they’ll learn how to distinguish that intuitively. So they play with the structure, they play with the rhythm. They play, they play, they play, until they tell a terrible joke, but you know, a proper joke. And jokes have no author but they work very similarly to the way literature works. Then there is this terrible feeling, this disappointment, that you cannot tell the same joke over and over to the same person. So you have to look for a new person to tell the joke to, or come up with a new one.

So then you are seven, eight, nine, ten. You already know how to tell jokes. And you go to school and the teacher says, we are going to study literature. You know nothing about it. But actually, you are the one who knows what literature is. You already know what literature is by your profound experience of learning to tell a joke. And there is something interesting and terrible about the fact that this knowledge you bring is somewhat looked over, or left unspoken. People think that when you start school you’re starting from scratch and everything that you learned before counts for nothing.

I want to ask about the books you read to your son, Silvestre. Do you have any favourites?

A lot. In fact, I made a list because I was asked by Fitzcarraldo to compile one for their website. They wanted me to talk about books I was reading when I wrote Childish Literature. And the first books that came to mind were children’s books. And then I thought, well, this is unfair, because, this is a collective thing, between me and Jazmina and Silvestre.

The writing process deals with this strangeness of simultaneously learning and unlearning and relearning how to write.

There’s this Italian writer, a genius, named Gianni Rodari, who wrote a lot of books for children. And, with his usual wiseness, Rodari says that a book is really working when the kid interrupts you – when he twitches his leg, you know, when he fidgets. And yet we expect them to concentrate in the way that Rodin’s Thinker concentrates. But when a kid’s really enjoying the book, he’s not quiet. He asks questions, he talks to the book. And with picture books, it’s interesting because you really feel like the kid is reading a totally different book to the one you’re reading aloud to him. What’s happening in their little head is completely different to what might be going on in yours. So I was interested to see what he would pick out. We spent the whole afternoon, thinking and playing. But there were some very important books for him that he didn’t include.

Things that he’d missed out?

I was reading back the list—

—And you noticed things should have been there?

Yeah. I was curious so I asked him, ‘Why didn’t you include those books by Oliver Jeffers or Jon Klassen or Mo Willems that you love?’ And he looked at me and said, ‘I don’t know dad. Tomorrow we can make another list.’ And yes, why not, we can make lists every day, that is what the game is about. And all those lists are equally and totally provisional.

Football occupies an interesting place in the book. You can tell you adore it. A protagonist in one of the stories – perhaps you, I’m not sure – is quite hilariously heartbroken because he can’t watch Chile play in the World Cup. He’s pretended to his girlfriend that he doesn’t like football in order to get together with her, and then he begins to resent her – and himself – because he can’t watch the games. And that’s how we know that relationship is never going to work. In fact, whenever football crops up in the book, it is always a vehicle for very naturally drawing people together or apart. And it’s interesting because the stories are made up of incidents which feel so believable and real. Somehow you can tell they’re not just literary devices or plot points contrived to push characters in one direction or another. I can’t quite say why, but they feel more authentic.

Thank you. In a way, this book changed from being a book about fatherhood to being a book about masculinity, maleness, and how all these things that were part of your life influence the way you raise a kid. And also it is a book about that period of your life when you have a son and your father is still alive, so in a way you are experiencing past, present and future simultaneously. It’s so easy to say: ‘I’m a new man. I’m different from my father.’ But of course it’s much more complex than that. And I think literature is the way you can talk about these things. It allows a conversation, a deeper conversation. Family relationships change, and the usual lexicon of rupture and reconciliation is not enough. You might decide to frame them in a certain way. You might say, ‘I hate my father’ or ‘I love my father’, or ‘my father wasn’t that bad’, or ‘my father was a great man’. But that all changes over time. And it lives on in your head even after they die. It is really incredible how impossible these relationships are to resolve. Those never-ending thoughts, those cycles, they could be seen as overwhelming. But I think literature is the place where those thoughts can be dwelled on, to think about and enjoy and discuss. And the deeper you go into your own self, the more collective it becomes. It’s not such an original idea.

I guess this is one of the strengths of autofiction. That plumbing the depths of your own experience can offer understandings that still speak to many people. But I’m not sure if you’d use that term, autofiction, yourself. How do you feel about it? It becoming such a defined, widely discussed genre.

I agree, it is a strength. But every time we use these concepts, it is because we love literature, and talking about literature is hard so we have these shortcuts, these labels, like autofiction or whatever. But what really makes a book good or bad is not even remotely related to the fact that they might follow the tenets of autofiction or are told in the first person or the second or the third person. This is something they ask you a lot when you teach creative writing. They ask, ‘should I write this in the third or the first person?’ Well, you have to do it both ways. We writers have this infallible method that is called trial and error…

You’d say to your students – or whoever you’d give advice to – that there are no rules?

Not in the way chess has rules. This is a delicate aspect of teaching creative writing. What you really have to do is accompany a writer. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot because it was my job for a long time, and I love it, but you cannot do, like, a short workshop expecting that to be really meaningful. Some years ago I was asked to do a 90-minute workshop for 40 people…

Do you think it’s a lost cause trying to teach creative writing?

No, no, no. Not at all. I love teaching, man! I’ll get back to it at some point, I just needed a long break for writing the books I dreamt – and keep dreaming – of writing. And I did say yes to that 90-minute workshop for 40 people. I asked myself what is the minimum portion of writing we could discuss in 90 minutes and the answer was very obvious: the title. So we workshopped all those 40 titles of the 40 writers that were in the room and I think it was fruitful and useful and fun, and I’ve repeated the experience a number of times. I love teaching Creative Writing. It is really challenging. Everything is on the table to be discussed. What seems to be permanent is constantly changing.

There is something tricky about technique. If you compare it to music, there is a moment where you are seven years old or fifteen years old and someone tells you, okay, this is A, three fingers together, this way. And then you practice, obsessed, for hours, for days, until it flows. And then you learn some other notes and you can play a decent version of, I don’t know, ‘Twist and Shout’. And later you are able to play all The Kinks’ repertoire, so you get to the point where you are ready to start improvising, but that is a big step. Of course improvising doesn’t come before, it happens after. Learning to write literature works similarly, although when you learned to play the guitar you really learned something you had no idea how to do. In order to write a poem or a novel you begin to play with words and play with structures, and then you master structures, and it seems you can do it. But your instrument was only ever the same one that you and everyone else have been playing every day with utterly non-literary intentions. The writing process deals with this strangeness of simultaneously learning and unlearning and relearning how to write.

How would you feel if your son grows up and tells you that he wants to be a writer.

Well, up to now, he wants to be a musician, a guitar player precisely… But I’m not answering your question! I just want him to be as lighthearted and funny and enthusiastic as he is now.

He’s been aware from a very young age that both his mother and father write books. But the book he likes the most of mine is a book I wrote for children. He gave all my author’s copies to his little friends. And—

—You wrote a book for children?

Yeah, yeah.

I didn’t know that. We should have covered this earlier, this is ridiculous.

Yeah, it’s called My Opinion on Squirrels. It’s a picture book. And it’s very much related to him. Because he realised that I’m afraid of squirrels. Very afraid. I hate them. And I’m sure they hate me. We were walking in this incredible park that we live nearby, and there were so many squirrels. And I’m not used to them because in Chile there are no squirrels in parks. And you know they have a lot of personality. Rats with a hairdo. They steal your food.

A squirrel has stolen your food?

Yeah, yeah. They are really like—

—That’s happened to you?

Yeah. It frightens me. And my son somehow realised this. He said, ‘Papa, I’m not afraid of them. You are.’ And so he learned that I was frightened of squirrels. And this little book is about that. He’s not afraid of them and thinks my fear is unreasonable, and he begins to adopt this tone – it’s very common in kids – where they become condescending.

The power dynamic shifts.

When we play soccer, for example, he’s totally sure he’s going to beat me. And with the squirrels, it was the same. So the book has that tone, like he’s protecting me. When Childish Literature came out, he said to me: ‘Dad, I want you to write another book of Childish Literature, but this time really literature for children, because this book is not a book for children and you should start writing books for children.’ I mean, it’s really, something I want to do. It’s so hard. People think that it’s really easy but it’s so hard.

I feel like we should have had Silvestre in this conversation too.

Yes, we should have. He’d be able to speak to you in English but only using words from Beatles’s songs. This is the English we speak here. In fact, I have to go and pick him up now.

Yes, no, you should. Say hi from me.

I promise.

.

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Image credits: Cristián Ortega Puppo

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.