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3.4 AVERAGE
3.4 AVERAGE
Monday:
Emily picked up the thick book, which had been placed in the very exact center of her desk. The precipice of paper upon which it had been teetering shifted slightly. "Who put this here?"
"I did."
"What's it for?" Emily pressed as much of herself as possible against the desk in an effort to stabilize the terrain on its surface. A stapler threw itself off the cliff and thunked on the floor.
"It's our book club book."
"We have a book club?" Emily couldn't hear her colleague's reply over the sound of the major geological event that left her desk clear and her floor very cluttered. She sighed. She put the book down in the very exact center of the desk and turned on her computer.
Tuesday:
"I'm on chapter four."
"I . . . can't find my copy."
Emily picked up the thick book, which had been placed in the very exact center of her desk. The precipice of paper upon which it had been teetering shifted slightly. "Who put this here?"
"I did."
"What's it for?" Emily pressed as much of herself as possible against the desk in an effort to stabilize the terrain on its surface. A stapler threw itself off the cliff and thunked on the floor.
"It's our book club book."
"We have a book club?" Emily couldn't hear her colleague's reply over the sound of the major geological event that left her desk clear and her floor very cluttered. She sighed. She put the book down in the very exact center of the desk and turned on her computer.
Tuesday:
"I'm on chapter four."
"I . . . can't find my copy."
SO DISTURBING. But good, if you're into that kind of thing.
I read this book because I had heard so many good things about it. For example, Jonathan Franzen said, "This crazy, gorgeous family novel is one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century."
It is the story of a real family with real problems, and the characters are fully fleshed out. Because it is a long novel, the author has the time and space to really explore the relationships between husband and wife, parents and children. It is fascinating the way that children can't seem to help loving their parents, even when they simultaneously despise them, even when they don't deserve their children's love. The descriptions of their home life, their thoughts, and their poverty are almost Dickensian in scope.
Many times, I shook my head in disgust at these parents and the way they treat their children, but at others I realized that sometimes I do or say similar things... to my horror.
An excerpt:
"Whenever her irritations got too deep, she mooches in to see her mother. Here, she had learned, without knowing she had learned it, was a brackish well of hate to drink from, and a great passion of gall which could run deep and still, or send up waterspouts, that could fret and boil, or seem silky as young afternoon, something that put iron in her soul and made her strong to resist the depraved healthiness and idle jollity of the Pollit clan.
It was a strange affection. It could never express itself by embraces or kisses, nothing more than a rare, cool, dutiful kiss on the withering cheek of Henny."
I am vacillating on this rating. It may in fact be closer to 5 stars.
It is the story of a real family with real problems, and the characters are fully fleshed out. Because it is a long novel, the author has the time and space to really explore the relationships between husband and wife, parents and children. It is fascinating the way that children can't seem to help loving their parents, even when they simultaneously despise them, even when they don't deserve their children's love. The descriptions of their home life, their thoughts, and their poverty are almost Dickensian in scope.
Many times, I shook my head in disgust at these parents and the way they treat their children, but at others I realized that sometimes I do or say similar things... to my horror.
An excerpt:
"Whenever her irritations got too deep, she mooches in to see her mother. Here, she had learned, without knowing she had learned it, was a brackish well of hate to drink from, and a great passion of gall which could run deep and still, or send up waterspouts, that could fret and boil, or seem silky as young afternoon, something that put iron in her soul and made her strong to resist the depraved healthiness and idle jollity of the Pollit clan.
It was a strange affection. It could never express itself by embraces or kisses, nothing more than a rare, cool, dutiful kiss on the withering cheek of Henny."
I am vacillating on this rating. It may in fact be closer to 5 stars.
This book created a whole world of its own in the Pollitt family, led by Sam Pollitt, a dogmatic man who imposed his childlike, occasionally sinister beliefs (eugenics) on his children, and his wife Henny who refused to tolerate him. She had her own dysfunctions, and the only sympathetic character was Louie, the 11-14 yr old daughter of Sam.
Often written in Sam’s invented language this book was a furious and funny autobiography. I kept thinking I disliked it, but I kept reading and it held my attention throughout.
Often written in Sam’s invented language this book was a furious and funny autobiography. I kept thinking I disliked it, but I kept reading and it held my attention throughout.
dark
funny
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
The Man Who Loved Children is such a hidden gem. The story follows a dysfunctional family that has too many children, too much struggle, and too many money problems. It studies this family in such a passionate, moving way. This story takes you all over the place and is never boring. Sam is such an interesting character who is a narcissist who often contradicts himself. I don't even know how to explain how amazing this book is and the struggles of having a narcissist in someone's life. It is a must-read and takes you on a roller coaster throughout the story.
This was unbearable. The story of the most miserable marriage ever. I hadn't read an older book in a while, and I had heard it was an amazing classic, so I gave it a try. But this was not the book for me. At first I thought it was going to be funny. Christina Stead is a wonderful wordsmith. The writing style is a little like A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES, in which the writer delights in unusual words, building up word pictures like sand castles in torrents of phrases. But the misery just overcame me midway through. It's hard to decide whom to hate more: the vicious, selfish, spoiled wife Henny who sees the world through shit-colored glasses, abuses her children (and especially her stepdaughter) and whines constantly about her come-down in life of having married a self-made made man. Or her husband who is manipulative, inappropriately needy and whiny with his children, blathers on fatuously about the joys of life and children, and basically just does whatever he wants the whole time. Argh.
2.5/5
Louie said,I don't entertain myself with media portraits of dysfunctional families. Some proclaim this to be a working model of every family at its heart of hearts; I say that anyone who says this is either a miserly blowhard trying to fit into mass appeal or a sadist-in-waiting looking to voyeuristically vent their frustrated aspirations on their own personal walking, talking financial investments. Having survived a family with many a memory of the scenes that can be drawn from Stead's pages, it's hilarious to me the fervor that has been cast over this work in recent times, looking like little more than a mixture of guilt, Highlanderism (there can only be one Australian/pre 1950's/woman writer/etc on our shelves), and complete and utter sensationalism, especially since the most infamous Stead devotee had to evaluate her Wikipedia portrait before proclaiming her an acceptable read (see the Wharton debacle for a contrasting narrative). All in all, this book really does have some good things to say about the nasty, brutish, and short lifeline of the decline and fall of the white nuclear family in its glory of antiqueerness, and the downright fascism of the patriarch makes the young girl character's bildungsroman (sym)pathetic in its doomed trajectory. Too bad it and the mass media atmosphere that surrounds it is altogether too nasty for me to waste much more time on.
The desolator desolate,
The tyrant overthrown;
The arbiter of other's fate,
A suppliant for his own!
Sam looked at her with a puzzled expression, "Why did you say that?"
She melted into a grin, "I just thought of it.
Poor good man, he thought that he had discovered a new principle...that the rich and powerful are human beings too.What's plain to see is, unless something truly revolutionary happens, the girlchild intended as a vehicle for the reader's compassion is going to go the exact same way as her dear old dad, with merely a literary, white feminism spin on his gleeful eugenics, antisemitism, antiblackness, and general self-idolizing grandeur. It's too bad, then, that the introduction kept moaning about language and myths of dichotomous gender roles, as it's merely one instance of other reader's willfully truncating their analysis to fit apolitical tasks to the point that I can hardly put credible stock in any of the hype, positive or negative. TO be perfectly honest, this only crossed my path for fulfilling yet another reading women challenge, and this was (in)famous enough for me to have run across a copy at a library sale sooner rather than later. Two of the women writers who sing Stead's praises I personally can't stand to various degrees, and the third has already been so popularly reviled that if I ever get to her, at least I won't have to trudge through my usual cycle of overly giving the benefit of the doubt in lieu of the public narrative of praise. I finished this work, tedious as it was at times, and the best part of it was the fascist calling themselves a socialist-see-no-evil-hear-no-evil-speak-no-evil white boy inevitably diving headfirst into Orientalism, as what this book does best is demonstrate the feeding chain of socially structured bigotry in all its grotesque machinations and pusillanimous glory. I'd view this book better if there weren't so much drama surrounding it, but alas. Most of the readers fueling such are the type to proclaim that racism is bad but spew on and on about "negativity" and "stereotyping" when confronted with the task of destabilizing harmful social structures, which is why buck tends to stop at all the Eurocentric 'typical family' nonsense in reviews. All in all, this odd duck of a tome could truly be something if the critical audience let it be such, but alas, the popular reception is on the verge of being as wish fulfillment for its proclaimers as are the sentiments of the book's titular character.
"Don't you think everyone has troubles?"
"A lot of people have a million dollars."
...[S]he had married a child whose only talent was an air of engaging helplessness by which he got the protection of certain goodhearted people—...in the deep past, by the same means, her own father.I'm annoyed at myself for taking this evaluation so personally, but after all, no one's paying me, and I am more authoritative than most when it comes to the political maneuvers and self-hating subversions one has to undergo since the point of cognizance until it's possible to escape such a self-immolating wasteland of exteriorized ego and interiorized negation. The book was brought to my attention in the most Twitter-drama of fashions, and after finishing it, and after finishing it, I'm mostly glad that I'm not likely to ever read it again. Stead's [b:Letty Fox: Her Luck|132508|Letty Fox Her Luck|Christina Stead|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1320400476s/132508.jpg|127637] appeals, but that's probably just the siren call of the NYRB Classic edition's siren call at work again, so until another chronologically structured reading women challenge comes along, I"m content to let other's fervently disinter this woman writer. I didn't love this, but I didn't consider it a complete waste of time; I just wish mass reading audiences weren't so predictable in their reading evaluations, as it makes for untrustworthy advertisements for even the most contentious of literary reputations. All I can say is, if that aforementioned white boy author comes trumpeting across the headlines with another buried representative of a marginalized demographic, I sure hope the readers in the know refrain this time from completely losing their heads.
The Kings of Egypt were dark; all the world was dark until a very little while ago. Then the white man came from some little crack in the earth. He does not know about the times before he came. That is how we feel, sah; he is an accident.
She isn't my sister: to come there at the last moment without giving me any warning, after being silent all that time and in that state—why didn't she die? I thought she was sure to. What am I to do? Everyone must know. She wouldn't be quiet; I kept trying to stop her.
"I've never done any wrong," said Jo, stony with pride and passion; "I've never done wrong to a single human being: no one can say that."
This book is exhausting, and initially it does seem to need some editing down as mentioned by others, but I think this is all part of the point. Dealing with narcists is exhausting and overwhelming. Dealing with two parents who are narcissistic to the point of psychopathy has be even more. I think when readers feel the book needs to be edited down, they are reacting to the overwhelming presence of the father (narcissistic proto-fascist) and mother (violent narcissist). You want them to shut up. you want them to focus on something other than themselves, but their narcissism drowns the reader as it does the children.
The writing it what makes it all bearable. Christina Stead's writing keeps you moving forward. It is light, but not dumbed down. It flows without being oversimplified. I wound up really enjoying this book, but I wanted to definitely strangle the father by the end (really the 20% mark), and I felt some sympathy for the mother. However, the insanity of the two adults makes you hurt for all the children who don't know enough to recognize anything being wrong with their parents or the family's situation.
The writing it what makes it all bearable. Christina Stead's writing keeps you moving forward. It is light, but not dumbed down. It flows without being oversimplified. I wound up really enjoying this book, but I wanted to definitely strangle the father by the end (really the 20% mark), and I felt some sympathy for the mother. However, the insanity of the two adults makes you hurt for all the children who don't know enough to recognize anything being wrong with their parents or the family's situation.
A difficult, infuriating, brilliant work. A work that demands that you read it on its own terms and gives no quarter to likability or comfort. I thought many times I wouldn't finish it. I'm glad I did.
I had never heard of Christina Stead or The Man Who Loved Children until I read Jonathan Franzen's recommendation of the book in an essay he wrote, in 2010, on the 70th anniversary of the book's publication (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/books/review/Franzen-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0). Franzen praises Stead's novel as an overlooked masterpiece, a brilliant work that should be "a core text in every women's study program in the country." Even more intriguing, at least to me, is Franzen's contention that the narrative "operates at a pitch of psychological violence that makes Revolutionary Road look like Everybody Loves Raymond." Now here is a book I had to read.
I'm not sure I agree with all of Franzen's observations of Stead's novel. The pacing of the narrative is so slow and its gaze upon the prosaic-yet-disturbing daily life of the Pollit family so unrelenting that the "pitch" Franzen talks about never quite happens for me. Sam Pollit is, indeed, one of the most loathsome characters I have ever read, yet unlike Franzen, I did not find his exploits funny. His unaccountable power over his family creates the central tension of the story arc, and I found his blissful ignorance and lack of comeuppance a little hard to take.
On the other hand, Stead has created a fascinating character in Louisa, Sam's daughter from a previous marriage, whose struggle to free herself from her father's monomanical determination to keep her with him and make her "like him" becomes, gradually, the novel's focus and climax. What begins as an unblinking look at Sam's doomed-from-the-start marriage to Henny, the spoiled daughter of a once rich but now dissipated Baltimore family, ends as Louie's story of (qualified) triumph. Most interesting here is the way that Stead characterizes Louie's battle with Sam in terms of language: Sam's private language, an annoying blend of sarcasm and baby-talk that only he speaks and with which he cajoles and controls his six (then seven) young children, dominates the narrative until Louie begins to challenge it with her own efforts to use language as a means of escape. She reads, memorizes, and recites poems, many of which Sam doesn't recognize. She writes constantly, first in verse, then in code, and ultimately in a language whose grammar and syntax she invents. Sam fights to silence Louie by mocking her, reading her journal aloud for the amusement of her siblings, and ridiculing her invented language because he cannot understand it.
While Sam's crimes are left largely unpunished and his self-delusions left largely intact, Louie wins the battle of words.
I'm not sure I agree with all of Franzen's observations of Stead's novel. The pacing of the narrative is so slow and its gaze upon the prosaic-yet-disturbing daily life of the Pollit family so unrelenting that the "pitch" Franzen talks about never quite happens for me. Sam Pollit is, indeed, one of the most loathsome characters I have ever read, yet unlike Franzen, I did not find his exploits funny. His unaccountable power over his family creates the central tension of the story arc, and I found his blissful ignorance and lack of comeuppance a little hard to take.
On the other hand, Stead has created a fascinating character in Louisa, Sam's daughter from a previous marriage, whose struggle to free herself from her father's monomanical determination to keep her with him and make her "like him" becomes, gradually, the novel's focus and climax. What begins as an unblinking look at Sam's doomed-from-the-start marriage to Henny, the spoiled daughter of a once rich but now dissipated Baltimore family, ends as Louie's story of (qualified) triumph. Most interesting here is the way that Stead characterizes Louie's battle with Sam in terms of language: Sam's private language, an annoying blend of sarcasm and baby-talk that only he speaks and with which he cajoles and controls his six (then seven) young children, dominates the narrative until Louie begins to challenge it with her own efforts to use language as a means of escape. She reads, memorizes, and recites poems, many of which Sam doesn't recognize. She writes constantly, first in verse, then in code, and ultimately in a language whose grammar and syntax she invents. Sam fights to silence Louie by mocking her, reading her journal aloud for the amusement of her siblings, and ridiculing her invented language because he cannot understand it.
While Sam's crimes are left largely unpunished and his self-delusions left largely intact, Louie wins the battle of words.