Man Who Loved Children

by Christina Stead

Paperback, 1980

Collections

Your library, World Literature

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Publication

Harcourt Brace* Co (1980), Edition: 0, Paperback

Description

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.

Media reviews

The Guardian

This novel is not for everyone, nor for every mood. I have read it twice with great admiration. When I tried to read it a third time (when I had a young family myself), I couldn't stand it. If Hamlet runs four hours and Lear almost five, well, The Man Who Loved Children runs 14 or 15 hours, and

though the plot is actually quite neat and progresses steadily, novel-readers are not used to 15-hour storms. The catharsis here, compared with any other tragedy, is a long time coming. Nevertheless, Stead's novel is like Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier in its power to astonish and compel with each reading. It is sui generis among novels, and Stead, too, never wrote anything else like it.

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— 4 more

New York Times

"Although “The Man Who Loved Children” is probably too difficult (difficult to stomach, difficult to allow into your heart) to gain a mass following, it’s certainly less difficult than other novels common to college syllabuses, and it’s the kind of book that, if it is for you, is really for

you. I’m convinced that there are tens of thousands of people in this country who would bless the day the book was published, if only they could be exposed to it. I might never have found my way to it myself had my wife not discovered it in the public library in Somerville, Mass., in 1983, and pronounced it the truest book she’d ever read."

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Span (37)

In a letter to Thistle Harris Stead in 1942 Christina Stead wrote: Every work of art should give utterance, or indicate, the dreadful blind strength and the cruelty of the creative impulse, that is why they must all have what are called errors, both of taste and style: in this it is like a

love-affair (a book, I mean.) A love affair is not delicate or clean: but it is an eye-opener! The sensuality, delicacy of literature does not exist for me; only the passion, energy and struggle, the night of which no one speaks, the creative act: some people like to see the creative act banished from the book - it should be put behind one and a neatly-groomed little boy in sailor-collar introduced. This is perhaps quite right. But for me it is not right: I like each book to have not only the little boy, not very neat, but also the preceding creative act: then it is only, that it gives me full satisfaction.1 Here is an author quite conscious of the imperfect, disunified nature of her art. In this letter, Stead shows a rather postmodern consciousness of the novel as creation and an interest in exposing the act of creation in the work of art. Without the assistance of poststructuralist critics, Stead points to the importance of 'errors' as indicators to the reader of art's place in life - art as 'struggle', as process rather than as product.

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Vrij Nederland

Zeer lovende bespreking. Ook nawoord en vertaling worden hogelijk geprezen. "Pas bij de heruitgave in 1966 kreeg het boek, mede door een lang nawoord van Randall Jarrell, de aandacht die het verdiende, en al snel werd het beschouwd als veruit de meest indrukwekkende roman uit de hele Australische

literatuur van de twintigste eeuw."

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NRC Handelsblad

Het is erg knap zoals Stead Sams maatschappelijke idealen koppelt aan de praktijk van het gezin – tirannie, manipulatie, geldingsdrang en emotionele chantage (‘Sammiepammie vraagt niet veel, alleen dit...’). De man die van kinderen hield is te vol om hier recht te doen, soms misschien zelfs

iets te vol. Maar de indruk die na lezing overblijft, is een aangrijpend beeld van destructie. De ideale staat die Sam thuis probeert te creëren, ontaardt in een hel. Een koningsdrama, maar wel een dat zich afspeelt binnen een ‘gewoon’ gezin. Het drama wordt door die gewoonheid alleen maar versterkt, en dat zal de reden zijn geweest dat het in de jaren zestig lezers wél aansprak, en dat het boek invloed zou krijgen op andere schrijvers. Ik kan me voorstellen dat bijvoorbeeld A.M. Homes dit las, voordat ze Music for Torching (1999) over een disfunctioneel gezin in een Amerikaanse buitenwijk schreef.

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