Distancia y lejania

María José Ferrada, writer

Alejandro Zambra, writer

For the adults that we are, childhood is a distant experience. Even so, there are writers and artists who insist on returning to it. Clarice Lispector, for example, said that the child was the one whose teeth had just been born, the same one who would be a doctor or carpenter. Janusz Korczak, a Polish writer and doctor, chose to define the boy by his weight: ten pounds. Eight of water and the rest, a handful of carbon, lime, nitrogen, potassium and iron. The boy, he explained, was, at last, a blade, a small particle. And Maurice Sendak —author of Where Monsters Live— made a definition that is still valid: childhood was “a complicated subject”.

Alejandro Zambra and María José Ferrada, as if putting together a puzzle or trying to make a bird walk on a rope, will delve into the memories of their rebellious and luminous days. Also in the function of literature and in its attempt to approach childhood.