María José Ferrada has spent her career communicating with children, entertaining and educating them while also learning from what they have to teach. Since 2010, she has published more than four dozen books for young readers and young adults, winning numerous awards in her native Chile, as well as other Spanish-speaking countries. During part of that time, she also served as editor of Chile Para Niños, a digital resource center at the national library, a position that offered a unique vantage point to observe children’s relationships with books and to appreciate, as she told one interviewer, the way they see the world “without the prejudices that we adults have, as if they were seeing it for the first time.”
While never losing focus on those younger audiences, Ferrada has also produced two novels for adults, both of which are told from a child’s point of view. The first, translated by Elizabeth Bryer and published in the United States in 2021 as How to Order the Universe, follows seven-year old M as she plays hooky with her traveling salesman father and his friends, smoking cigarettes, watching movies, and helping the men ply their trade by employing her “repertoire of gazes … [her] infallible instrument of connection.” When M is nine years old, her mother’s past — and the violent past of the Pinochet dictatorship — catch up with her, ending her nascent apprenticeship, her parent’s marriage, and her childish innocence. Five years later, M tries to rekindle her relationship with her father, but notices an emptiness in his life and of those like him. She is heartbroken but doesn’t want to suffer from and succumb to that same fate. Adults reading the novel, however, know that the past is not so easily discarded, a truth enforced in a very meta sense by the existence of the novel, which Ferrada has said was inspired by her own relationship with her father, a traveling salesman.
The inescapable imprint of the past is even more prominent, and for me more poignantly portrayed, in Ferrada’s excellent sophomore novel, How to Turn Into a Bird, again beautifully translated by Bryer. The narrative is propelled by 11-year old Miguel’s relationship with his uncle Ramón, who decides to live on the Coca-Cola billboard he is responsible for maintaining. Thematically the novel is concerned with identity, poverty, and inequality. Miguel’s unprejudiced and pure perspective, often childlike but never childish, permits readers to draw their own conclusions about the actions of the adults in his life — Ramón, his aunt Paulina, his mother, and the other residents in and around his neighborhood. Many, most prominently his mother, carry scars that prevent them from ever fully leaving their pasts behind, and that continue to define how they behave even as they imagine that they have moved on, succeeded, or evolved.
The housing complex, on the outskirts of Santiago where Miguel grows up, is a lattice of identical four-story buildings erected alongside a highway, an area that “had missed out on its share of pavement and trees because there had not been enough to spare.” Families come expecting to stay for a few months but end up remaining for years, a testament to the fact that “things don’t always turn out the way you hope.” Rooms have “damp stains on the walls,” and because of shoddy construction, noise from one apartment can be heard several floors away, enabling “a free-of-charge, stifling communications network that in some ways resembled a spiderweb,” another way that the residents are trapped and vulnerable. Many were impoverished or homeless at one point in their lives, including Miguel’s mother and aunt who grew up in a place where there was “no work, no food, no nothing, so they had to leave it behind,” walking for ten days “until their shoes fell apart.” Today, the residents see themselves as “respectable people who bathed in the morning, worked during the day, and slept at night,” but their futures are anything but certain. They buy things on credit from the small store that Miguel’s mother owns, but not all of them can pay at the end of the month, landing them a spot on her “list of shame.”
Miguel’s mother, who is never given a name, has come far in her life, but perhaps not as far as she thinks. Her love for her son “could very quickly transform into hate,” particularly when she grew “tired of dealing with the distance between the image she had of herself and the one the rest of us have of her.” Nothing reminds Miguel’s mother of her past more forcefully, and often more violently, than the smell of smoke, an association that is revived when a group of homeless people start building cardboard shanties along the canal that runs next to the highway. Compassion — as we are continually reminded by the world around us — can be depressingly hard to summon for those who believe that their security, whether financial or physical, is precarious, or for those who focus on feeling aggrieved — they raised themselves up so why shouldn’t others be forced to do so, too? And indeed the residents of the housing complex react with contempt instead of compassion, their council meetings eliciting classic calls of NIMBYism, “They needed to live someplace, that was understandable, but did that place have to be right here, when there was so much city to go round?”
Miguel, however, doesn’t understand the concern, likening a homeless girl he speaks with to a childhood photo of his aunt,:“They were very alike, so alike that they were really the same girl.” Another time he points out that several of the neighborhood children “weren’t sure whether ‘population’ meant the population of the housing complex or the whole world.” But when the homeless children try to join in the housing complex’s celebration of children’s day, the adults’ definition of population is made starkly clear. Residents retreat further into the fear that the neighborhood is becoming more dangerous, that the homeless “needed to be moved on,” that “anything and everything that didn’t function according to the laws of the group” had to go. Including Ramón.
Despite his decade-long marriage to Paulina, 36-year-old Ramón was a loner at heart, searching for silence since he was a child. He and Paulina met as schoolmates, and his love overcame his true nature. He “let himself be anchored” by her. Before moving into his advertising aerie, Ramón worked in a PVC factory, a job with long hours and dangerous working conditions, epitomized by a traumatic accident years earlier when a coworker mistook a man’s arm for the pipe he was meant to be cutting. That “noise of blade, bone, and cartilage [awakens] Ramón’s need for distance once more,” a need he meets by moving out. His new employer, who repeatedly calls him Raúl, is not interested in what Ramón does or where he lives as long as the lights illuminating their billboard are not stolen, telling him, “If that means you need to sleep up there, swing from a cloud, or hide in the bushes, in all honesty we don’t care.”
Ramón is almost regarded as a child himself, with some calling him a “moron” or referring to him as “mad,” though most of the neighborhood begrudgingly views him “with a mixture of contempt and admiration.” Many of his interactions with Miguel are lighthearted and fanciful, but increasingly they are overpowered by melancholy and dictated by his battle with alcoholism.
Paulina is the most directly affected by her husband’s departure, yet she is also the only adult able to exist for someone outside herself, the only one who has learned from her past and grown from those lessons. She acts as a surrogate mother to Miguel, trying to shield him from his mother’s violent mood swings, while striving to keep her own sorrows at bay, focusing on “the problems of today, not on the problems of yesterday or the day after tomorrow.”
Miguel visits Ramón both with and without Paulina, offering insight into the slow disintegration of their relationship, which occurs without animosity. The visits are kept from his mother and their neighbors, but rumors start to circulate about people climbing up the billboard. Miguel sees himself on “a path of courage and independence,” in possession of that special secret that can be so precious to a child — something all your own — and he comes to view himself as “Ramón’s accomplice as well as his friend.”
Bryer’s translation deftly captures the novel’s various registers, whether it is Ramón’s idealized description of the city lights that he sees blooming after the sun sets, “bright lemons and oranges that an absentminded gardener had let fall to the ground in the garden-night,” or the disdain with which Miguel’s mother views her son, her absent husband, her sister Paulina, Ramón, and “all the residents of the damn” housing complex, calling them “such leeches, so ungrateful, so stupid.”
Lots of novelists choose children to tell their stories, but don’t always embrace the constraints that come with age, turning precocity into prophecy. Ferrada, much like Jacqueline Woodson in Red at the Bone, knows that freedom may be found in the fetters of youth, allowing her readers to learn along with her characters. One of those important lessons that too many adults don’t seem understand, in the real world and in Miguel’s housing complex, is acceptance, whether it is accepting those who do not have the same advantages as you — both those that have been given or earned — or accepting those who are different from you. “One side of love, an undervalued one, has to do with letting the other person walk their own path. Paulina understood this, Ramón understood this, and now it was my turn.” Out of the mouths of babes.
[Published by Tin House Books on December 6, 2022, 296 pages, $16.95 US paperback]