Huacho Readings: Childhood Libraries in Current Chilean Narrative

Abstract

This article analyzes the representations which six chilean writers project in recent narratives (of an autobiographical and autofictional type), and which revolve around what Sylvia Molloy has termed “reading scenes”. Leonardo Sanhueza, Alejandro Zambra, Lina Meruane, Rafael Gumucio, Luis López-Aliaga and Diego Zúñiga present characters which manage to approach the world of books and reading, but do so at great pains, mainly due to the dismantling of cultural policies during the military dictatorship and the loneliness they live inside family structures. In that literary desert they are made up as readers and authors, in spite of the scarcity of the libraries they go into.