The Man Who Loved Children
With an Introduction by Randall Jarrell. Sam and Henny Pollit have too many children, too little money, and too much loathing for each other. As Sam uses the children's adoration to feed his own voracious ego, Henny watches in bleak despair, knowing the bitter reality that lies just below his mad...
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With an Introduction by Randall Jarrell. Sam and Henny Pollit have too many children, too little money, and too much loathing for each other. As Sam uses the children's adoration to feed his own voracious ego, Henny watches in bleak despair, knowing the bitter reality that lies just below his mad visions. A chilling novel of family life, the relations between parents and children, husbands and wives, The Man Who Loved Children, is acknowledged as a contemporary classic.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780312280444 (0312280440)
Publish date: July 6th 2001
Publisher: Picador
Pages no: 576
Edition language: English
Category:
Classics,
Novels,
Literature,
Cultural,
Literary Fiction,
20th Century,
Family,
Contemporary,
Modern,
Womens,
Australia
This is a strange book. My knowledge of Australian based or influence literature is very lacking. The writer, Stead, was born down under but the book takes place in Washington. So really what is it? It reads like magic realism, but it’s not really. In some ways, Stead reminds me of Angela Carte...
from Katha Pollitt and Marjorie Williams' discussion at Slate: "It is one of the greatest novels about childhood I have ever read. Actually, it is one of the greatest novels I have ever read -- it should be just as well-known as Ulysses or To the Lighthouse as a classic of twentieth-century literatu...
This novel is the dysfunctional family writ large. Dad is a civil servant naturalist with superficially benevolent ideas about the world and mankind, but with a heavy dose of sexism, a leaning toward eugenics, a disdain for literature, and most importantly a massive dose of narcissism hidden beneath...
As good and as brutal on childhood as Cat's Eye.
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