In recent years, a new thematic line has emerged among male writers linked to the fact of being fathers. Literature has inherited great titles about the destructive bond with the parent, about their sacrifices from the patriarchal vision or about their absence, but now we can count on Books that explore new fatherhood and they leave us with a loving reflection that, above all, gives hope by influencing an (indispensable) paradigm shift.
Diary of a life
We didn’t know that it was necessary to write in Spanish about fatherhood from a place of empathy, curiosity and the act of raising a child with love until Andrés Neuman did it. The Spanish-Argentine writer began writing, after learning that a child with his genes was on the way, a series of thoughts, emotions and anecdotes that, for the moment, have become two books: Umbilical y Little speaker. And it is not that there are no good fathers in literature, but that The winner of multiple awards for his literary work combined his great talent in writing, his academic knowledge and his reflective power with the love that comes from knowing that one is capable of giving lifeThis fact, so common, contains an immense complexity, especially for men, who have grown up in a world where child care has depended only on the mother.
So, Neuman melts like butter when talking about every little gesture of her son, but she does not stop observing what happens in his soul. and in the lives of those close to him when faced with this baby and later child that fills them with wonder. His fatherhood is then confronted with the past, and moves towards the future. The man focuses on caring for Telmo but also for his partner, his father and even his absent but always present mother, to show that it is possible to break the social mould and be a part of even the tenderly mediocre days in which he himself is slowly being born as a father without any kind of border or limitation.
Little speaker
Andres Neuman
ALFAGUARA
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Fire and support
Sergio C. Fanjul is an astrophysicist by training and a poet by vocationWith such a mix of professions, one cannot be indifferent to the arrival of a daughter to whom one can speak, as Juan Carlos Baglietto would sing, of the love between a cloud and a flying fish. However, when it seemed that everything was about talking about stars and comets, the writer’s mother died. Eseemingly indescribable shock, that dichotomy between Eros (seen as the life force) and Thanatos, is expressed in the pages of The father of firewhere he mixes reflection, poetry and narrative to share his journey through fear, pain, separation and fatigue with which he begins his journey through fatherhood, without forgetting parenting and what happens in a relationship when the world turns upside down after the arrival of a third element in a bond idyllically conceived just for two.
The father of fire
Sergio C. Fanjul
AGUILAR
Children’s literature is a book by Alejandro Zambra that moves, interests and entertains. Combining texts that he had published in The New Yorker and other media, weaves, with the help of editor Andrés Braithwaite, uA beautiful blanket to pamper anyone’s fatherhood, while he lets himself be carried away by the words, by the dialogue, by the delicacy of his literature in a series of stories where he demonstrates what he wrote in Chilean poet: “Being a father means letting yourself be defeated until the day when defeat is real.” However, in this diary of fatherhood (his own first) there is support for a new way of seeing this supreme responsibility, which is made clear in the last sentence written in this title: “…I have to go precisely because Silvestre leaves school at half past one – I like to arrive fifteen or twenty minutes before they open the gate and he runs to hug me like someone returning from a very long trip through deserts and savannahs.”
Children’s literature
Alejandro Zambra
Anagram Ocean
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Books that explore new fatherhood
“I have been walking and writing for five years while holding in my hand the hand of a son who enters and leaves these stories (that I write), and who runs to hide in some of them and who sometimes even whispers his own to me. A son who, suddenly, forced me to write as a father,” he shares. Eduardo Halfon in Any sonwhere he assumes what happens when a new life is lit: the sensor of the past is activated, of one’s own childhood, of the care we receive, because that will be reflected in the unitary experience of parenthood. He, like Neuman, became a father in his forties, an age at which men, faced with such a situation, either run away after the halo of their previous existence or assume what is coming in a bright and courageous manner.“Talking to my unborn child calmed me down. I’m getting sleep again. It was the only time literature was useful,” he wrote in a letter to his son Leo before he was born. Therein lies the secret of constructive attachment: knowing that this new “someone” is the basis of everything, but that doesn’t mean that it will distance man from what he has built as a creative being.
Any son
Eduardo Halfon
Books of the Asteroid
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The last children has the same central theme, but from a totally different angle than the previous books. “There are many myths about fatherhood, that it brings the greatest happiness, that idea of completeness that only this experience has… but I wanted a hard novel, to build an idea of what it is to be a father. From society, from what others tell me and from my own questions about it.”, explained recently its author, the writer from Monterrey Antonio Ramos Revillas, in a panel on new fatherhoods at the International Book Fair for University Students, organized by UNAM. For this reason, he focuses on what happens when there is death and not birth, because his novel is a road trip through the desert of northern Mexico and through the souls of the main couple, whose pregnancy does not come to term. Thus, with mastery, Ramos confronts those who read it with the dark and unhinged world that sometimes arises when the hope of giving life is suspended, with what that implies for a man who longed to be a father.
The last children
Antonio Ramos Revillas
Almadia Publishing House
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