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Childish Things

Valéry Larbaud

Translated from the French by Catherine Wald

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A Sun & Moon title.

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"Enfantines [Childish Things] is my favorite book.”
—Marcel Proust

Childhood seems a separate history for most of us, a simple time before the weight of daily life slows our efforts, a time when the clock was merely “the face” whose constantly moving hands had little significance to us. Valéry Larbaud’s Enfantines, translated for the first time into English as Childish Things, tells a different story, one in which the marvelous complexities of “play” that Larbaud describes will bring back memories of the fullness of a child’s experience.

Larbaud’s children stand at the threshold of adolescence, sensing what is to come: “In the funny papers you see jokes about ‘enfant terribles’; why are there never any jokes about terrible parents? Maybe because they really are too terrible. But there’s another thing: little by little you give up trying to make yourself understood.” And yet Childish Things, like few other works of fiction, understands this bittersweet transformation, and, without condescending, gives us lyrical tales of the world of children-—from the inside.

Born in 1881, Valéry Larbaud is well known as a fiction writer, critic, and translator of English-language works into French. Perhaps his most noted novel was Journal d’A. O. Barnabooth, originally published in 1913. Larbaud died in 1957.