Infancy in Paradise: Autobiographical Novel

ABOUT INFANCY IN PARADISE

In Infancy in Paradise, the poet, essayist and short-story writer Mercedes Cortázar narrates the absorbing account of a girl from a family of educators who teaches herself to read and write at the age of three, and that’s only the beginning of her troubles. In her father’s library, she secretly immerses herself in the classics. In the neighborhoods to which her family moves, she makes friends with children who haven’t yet learned to speak, connects with prodigies to construct a future world, befriends an old woman who’s visited the remotest parts of this world. Encountering the sorting of genders and the overprotected offspring of the upwardly mobile, her wisdom grows, forced by the demands made by an unstable mother and the equally unstable social conditions around her, which include her father’s political ambitions and his philandering, The product of bookish knowledge and penetrating observation of other children, adults including her own parents, and extraordinary events she has the misfortune to witness first-hand, the protagonist derives a philosophy from the ups and downs suffered by her dysfunctional family and country, a Caribbean island whose independence from Spain had been achieved barely four decades before her birth. All of this is foregrounded when her father, a primary school teacher who becomes a respected senior official in the Ministry of Education, turns into a politician with plans to run for a seat in the island’s Senate. Meanwhile, the country’s new republic begins to crumble as violent factions fight to take control of the government. The central character, of incredible precocity, is a lucid witness to the chilling situations she is condemned to behold. She feels human misfortunes not remotely and dispassionately, but as unfiltered and terrifying events, and by living them she becomes a thoughtful and ethical human being. A cruel act of violence marks the end of the unconsciousness of her childhood, sending her back in her life to discover the reason for the chaos she has witnessed. Remembering her birth, and even what happened before she was born, she relives the magical, supernatural, and amazing world of her early years, and learns to endure the monotony and suffocating tyranny of school and the mockery of “normal” children. She analyzes everything she encounters in her search for the meaning of existence: the Catholic and Protestant religions; the cruelty and hypocrisy of adults and children; the cynicism, corruption and venality of politics; prejudices about class, race, nationality, gender and sexual preference; the criminal intolerance directed at those who do not belong to the tribe, at the one who is different. With her penetrating critical gaze, she views the wild world that she has survived thanks to resourcefulness, courage, and mindfulness of justice, and realizes that this is only the beginning. This novel of formation makes the reader experience, through another world in another era, a reality that, far from a nostalgic glimpse into the past, presents a disturbing view even into the turmoil of the present day.