The Child [Paperback]

Jules Valles (Author), Douglas Parmee (Introduction)

Book Description

Series: New York Review Books Classics | Publication Date: January 31, 2005

The Child is a story about growing up that is comparable in humor and humanity to Great Expectations, even as its unflinching exposure of violence and hypocrisy foreshadows the nightmare realsim of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Jules Vallès, an anarchist and a bohemian, dedicated his book "to all those who were bored stiff at school or reduced to tears at home, who in childhood were bullied by their teachers or thrashed by their parents," and it tells the (autobiographical) tale of a young boy constantly scapegoated and abused, emotionally and physically, by his peasant mother and schoolteacher father, whose greatest concern is to improve their social status. But the young hero learns to stand up to his parents, even to love them, in time, and for all the intense pain the book registers it is anything but dreary. To the contrary, Vallès’s book is one of the funniest in French literature, a triumph of insubordinate comedy over the forces of order and the self-appointed defenders of decency.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

JULES VALLES (1832–1885), French writer and revolutionary, is most famous for his trilogy of autobiographical novels: L’Enfant (The Child), Le Bachelier (The Graduate), and L’Insurgé (The Insurgent). Through Vallès’s alter ego, Jacques Vingtras, the books describe the writer’s difficult childhood as the abused son of a schoolteacher, his rejection of his classical education and growing admiration for the peasant class, and finally his bohemian life in Paris as a militant journalist and pamphleteer. Vallès grew up in the provinces and came to Paris to study as a young man. Forced by his family to return home, he soon rebelled against his socially ambitious father and returned to the capital. There Vallès associated with other young radicals and published articles in various left-wing newspapers under a series of pseudonyms, which nevertheless failed to protect him from government persecution. Vallès led protests against the repressive policies of Napoleon III and played a significant role in the Paris Commune of 1871; his newspaper, Le Cri du Peuple (The Cry of the People), became the mouthpiece of the revolt. After the defeat of the Commune, Vallès was exiled for nine years, which he spent mostly in London, writing articles and composing his autobiographical trilogy. Upon his return to Paris, he resurrected Le Cri and spent the last five years of his life working furiously on articles, pamphlets, and the last book of his trilogy.

Product Details

• Paperback: 376 pages
• Publisher: NYRB Classics (January 31, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590171179
• ISBN-13: 978-1590171172
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #218,512 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Definately worth reading, June 17, 2007

By 

J. Swagman - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Child (Paperback)

this is the first book in the "Jacques Vingtras" trilogy, which is the Roman-a-clef tale of Jules Valles's childhood from hell.



(The middle book in the series "The Graduate", which describes the 1848 Revolution, the 1851 coup by Napoleon III, and the struggle of Jules Valles and his friends to keep the socialist movement alive during the repressive period of the second empire, has, as far as I can tell never been translated into English. Or at least my search of the Internet reveals neither current nor used copies available for sale, nor in any library.)



Interestingly enough, although "The Insurrectionist" has long been out of print, and "The Graduate" never translated into English, "The Child" has recently been republished by the New York Review Books in 2005, and should be much more easily available for anyone interested.



Although I hold out some hopes that this may signal a plan to republish all of Jules Valles's works, the publishers introduction states that they wanted to bring "The Child" to a larger audience because they believed this book, unlike the rest of Jules Valles work, is of interest to everyone whether they are political or not.



The book begins with the words: "I dedicate this book to all those who were bored stiff at school or reduced to tears at home, who in childhood were bullied by their teachers or thrashed by their parents." Although this story is certainly anti-authoritarian and anti-establishment, it is largely apolitical (except for the last few chapters when Valles becomes interested in the history of the French Revolution).



Because of the excessive misfortunes of Jules Valles (or Jacques Vingtras, his Roman-a-clef counterpart), and the humorous way in which they are related, this work has often been compared to Charles Dickens.



No doubt if Jules Valles had lived today, no one would begrudge him years of therapy after this childhood. As it was, it is small wonder that this man grew up to become a lifelong rebel and outsider. And the tone of the book is set right from the beginning:



Was I breast-fed by my mother? Did I get my milk from some peasant wet nurse? I just don't know. But whatever breast I may have gnawed at, I don't remember, when I was tiny, ever being cuddled, made a fuss of, pampered, indulged, given little kisses...I was given lots of beatings.

My mother says: spare the rod and spoil the child. And every morning she gives me a beating; and if she doesn't have time in the morning, she'll save it until the afternoon, hardly ever later than four o'clock.

Madame Balandreau...is a kindly old spinster of fifty. She lives downstairs. In the beginning, she was quite pleased: not having a clock, she used me to tell the time. "Slap! Bang! Wham! Whack! Whack! It's that youngun upstairs getting his walloping, time to make my coffee."



And from this beginning, Valles continues through the rest of the book to detail every cruelty his parents ever inflicted on him.



As a child who was beat regularly by both parents, some of Valles's complaints are no doubt valid. But as the book continues, some of the things he chronicles seem to be almost petty, such as the ridiculous clothes his mother sent him off to school in, or how his paranoid mother, fearing for his safety, was always forbidding him to do anything the other children regularly enjoyed.



Especially for a man who, in his adult life, lived on the streets, was imprisoned, shot at, and witnessed the massacres at the end of the Paris Commune, it seems a bit strange that near the end of his life he was still obsessed with chronicling everything that was denied to him as a child. It's amazing how deep the wounds of childhood can be.



This book could have ended up being a very depressing read, but fortunately Jules Valles keeps his sense of humor with him as he writes it, and so I found myself mostly laughing as the young Jacques Vingtras goes from one childhood misadventure to another. The tone does occasionally darken, such as when Valles describes a childhood friend of his who was beaten to death by her father, and how this incident convinced him the rest of his life he would stick up for the defenseless. But on the whole, it was one of the funniest books I've read in a long time.



The mother in the book is described by some reviewers as a sadist for all the ways she thinks up to torment her husband and her child. Her stubbornness in the various battles of wills she gets into reminds me a lot of the mother from "Malcolm in the Middle". Consider this scene from one of the family's journeys.



"You're not hungry?" my father inquired on the way.

"Why should I be hungry?" my mother retorted.

I have to tell you that in the course of the previous evening, my father had suggested eating at the buffet in Vierzon, in case we weren't able to find anywhere to eat later on. My mother had turned down this suggestion and she had no intention of letting her decision be questioned by being asked if she was hungry now....

My father didn't argue...because his hands were tied; when we left, he acted most unwisely: he handed over all our money to his wife.

My mother had said in an innocent voice, "I've got bigger pockets than you, they'll hold the money better. I can pay for everything on the journey."

Initially my father didn't appreciate the full extent of his misfortunes of the seriousness of his error; but at the first change of horses, the blow struck home: he had no money at all, not a single franc, not even a couple of sous. He'd given away all his small change in tips to railway porters and such. Now he didn't even have enough to buy a glass of currant brandy....



This battle over money continues over the rest of the chapter, with the father and son continually trying to find ways to get some food or drink.



Aside from his parents, Valles's second target is his education. Valles details all the ridiculous antics that go on during his thoroughly classical education. Some of this seems straight out of Monty Python, like the Latin poem they are supposed to write about the death of a parrot:



We'd been told to write about the death of a parrot. I'd said everything anyone could say when confronted by such a calamity: that I'd never find consolation; that when he saw the cage-now transformed into a coffin-Charon would drop his oars; that moreover I'd be burying him myself-triste ministerium-and that we'd be scattering flowers-manibus lilia plenis.

In one of my ingenious lines, I'd exclaimed: "Now, alas, you can plant parsley on the tomb!"

The teacher compliments me on this last subtle touch, but I've come second to Bresslair, who showed even deeper emotion and more sincere grief...He hit on the idea, borrowed from hymn tunes, of introducing a repeated refrain:

Psittacus interrit! Jam fugit psittacus, eheu!-The Parrot has died! It has already passed away, alas!



And my favorite part was the commotion young Vingtras caused in his examination when he stated that there were 8 (instead of 7) properties of the soul.



All in all, a very funny and moving book. Definitely worth reading.

5.0 out of 5 stars On the pettiness of some of the abuse in The Child, May 20, 2011

By 

Michaela Pohl (Poughkeepsie, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Child (Paperback)

I'm responding here to the previous very thoughtful review by J. Swagman which adds a lot to my understanding. I'm reading the book as a survivor of similar childhood abuse (albeit in Germany, in 1960s) and he is definitely a very careful observer. It is compelling to be his therapeutic witness, in a way, over a century later, because all the descriptions are so authentic and his mother so similar to mine, if for slightly different reasons.

The review by J. Swagman mentions what seems like petty details. This is in fact one the strengths of the book! Let me explain. I think what seems petty depends on the spirit in which it was done. A lot of abusive people try actually *not* to cross the line of what other parents or the broader public might find offensive, at least after the child is in public school, there are some limits to what you can inflict on or withdraw from a child.

Valles shows all this "little" abuse, the "legal" abuse (and of course the range of what was considered "ok" to do to a child was much larger in 19th century France), the tone in which everything is said, the "little" beatings ("cuffing," "boxing ears," pushing), the varied but constant humiliations, and again and again gives insight why his mother (the main culprit) is that way: her sexual frustrations, small fears about social status, imagined social set backs, imagined rumors about her marriage, her fears about being meaningless to her husband, and so on. I can't do it justice, but the best thing is his language. Short punchy sentences full of authentic details about body language and facial expressions. I have to say the German translation by Christa Hunscha is a little better IMHO.

There is a scene where people laugh cruelly at Jacques because he wants to bury a dog he loved rather than "just" put its body in the garbage. It captures the icyness and cruelty in my family perfectly, as well. I'm not usually a reader who reduces everything to therapy or themselves, as a historian I can appreciate Valles on many other levels as well. I picked this up to consider for one of my classes, in fact, and it ended up being a stunningly personal read. Survivors of abuse can have a very generalized memory and struggle to recover details. His recall is amazing, the emotional authenticity is plain as day. Definitely has universal appeal in that it shows how a sharp mind can liberate itself from the fears and obsessions in an abusive family, but the pain remains all your life.