A series of luminous, autobiographical vignettes weave the childhood memories of Argentina’s great, rediscovered literary innovator into a tapestry of Proustian brilliance.
Beginning with her family’s departure from Buenos Aires in 1910, Norah Lange’s Notes from Childhood is a glimpse into the author’s sometimes magical, sometimes painful evolution into and beyond her roles as a daughter, watcher, and thinker. These intimate moments serve as windows onto a world of innocent voyeurism and surreal misunderstanding, as Lange’s family learns to live with the eccentric little spy in their midst—and vice versa. Lange recalls her older sister bathing nude in the moonlight, she recalls the death of a horse, she recalls how she cried when she was lifted onto a table and dressed as a boy, and yet how she laughed when climbing onto the roof in men’s clothing to throw bricks.
Through a veneer of comforting domesticity, these “notes” show us childhood at its most elemental: a laboratory of life in which strangeness, joy, terror, and eroticism combine and collide.