Childhood and the fresh gaze

A child does not understand everything it sees, and that is precisely what makes its gaze useful: it describes without judging, and the reader judges in its place. Hence a long line of narratives in which an orphan crosses London, a Guinean boy leaves his village for school, two Bengali children run to watch a train go by. Cinema made it one of its great subjects, with a Parisian adolescent on the run, a son following his father in the hunt for a stolen bicycle, a little girl who believes she sees a monster on the plains of Castile.

Classroom reading paths

L'enfance (being reviewed)

works 12

• NovelOliver TwistCharles Dickens · 1838London, its workhouses and its gangs of child thieves, through the fate of an orphan.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelThe Adventures of Tom SawyerMark Twain · 1876The book looks at childhood from the outside, with the complicity of the adult who remembers it and the irony of one who has seen what the small town was worth.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelNobody's BoySans familleHector Malot · 1878A foundling travels the country with a troupe of travelling entertainers, in search of his family.Literature
• NovelThe Lost EstateLe Grand MeaulnesAlain-Fournier · 1913A school novel that tips into the marvellous when an older pupil discovers a party in a lost estate.LiteraturePublic domain
• NarrativeMy ChildhoodДетствоMaxim Gorky · 1914First part of the author's autobiographical trilogy, serialised in 1913-1914: a childhood in the house of a dyer grandfather.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelPather Panchali: Song of the Little Roadপথের পাঁচালীBibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay · 1929A boy's childhood in a poor village in Bengal, at the beginning of the twentieth century, seen at the level of the seasons and of play.Literature
• CinemaBicycle ThievesLadri di bicicletteVittorio De Sica · 1948In postwar Rome, a father loses the bicycle on which his new job depends.Cinema
• CinemaForbidden GamesJeux interditsRené Clément · 1952Two children of the fields invent, in the midst of war, a secret game around death.Cinema
• NovelThe Dark ChildL'Enfant noirCamara Laye · 1953A young Guinean, a worker by day and a student in the evening in Paris, writes the story of his childhood.Literature
• CinemaPather Panchaliপথের পাঁচালীSatyajit Ray · 1955A boy's childhood in a poor village in Bengal, among his mother, his sister and an old aunt.Cinema
• CinemaThe 400 BlowsLes Quatre Cents CoupsFrançois Truffaut · 1959A boy from Paris, unloved at home and punished at school, gradually sinks into lying.Cinema
• CinemaThe Spirit of the BeehiveEl espíritu de la colmenaVíctor Erice · 1973Ana, six years old, sees Frankenstein at the village cinema and sets out to look for the monster, whom her sister says is alive.Cinema