What We Don't Know about Children [Hardcover]

Simona Vinci (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 6, 2000

A best-seller in Italy, where it sparked intense debate, Simona Vinci's first novel was awarded the prestigious Elsa Morante Prize and subsequently was acquired by publishers around the world. Clearly an accomplished and important book, it is also a profoundly disturbing one.

In a suburb of Bologna, three boys and two girls--ranging in age from ten to fifteen--enter the season of long summer days and the mysterious beauty of the cornfields surrounding the town. There, in an abandoned shack, they discover the excitement of being part of a group with its own rules and secrets. Normal kids who Rollerblade and play the same video games and Oasis and Alanis Morissette CDs that kids play everywhere, they come from normal families, their parents just as busy as most are these days. Although everyone assumes that someone will keep an eye on the kids--they're always playing out front in the parking lot, aren't they?--this assumption turns out to be false.

Tiring of familiar childish pastimes, these five ride bikes or scooters out to their clubhouse and awkwardly begin their sexual initiation, liberated by innocence and driven by natural curiosity. But this rite of passage is gradually perverted by images from the adult world; as these increase in creepiness and violence, inevitably the games these confused and powerless children play, mimicking desires not their own, become horrifyingly real.

Claustrophobic, mesmerizing and unflinching, What We Don't Know About Children is a brave exploration of eroticism and a harsh indictment of a society whose dark, disturbing aspects leave that most fragile, vulnerable blessing--childhood--forever at risk.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Winner of Italy's Elsa Morente Prize for Best First Novel, this compact story is a perversely compulsive read in the tradition of Bataille's Story of the Eye and Duras's The Lover. In Bologna one summer, two teenage boys and three preadolescents begin an innocent exploration of their sexuality. Their play starts with youthful curiosity, devoid of passion, in an abandoned shed on the outskirts of town. Fifteen-year-old Mirko is the leader, the only one with an inkling of adult desires. The othersA14-year-old Luca, and Matteo, Greta and Martina, all 10 years oldAare still unformed, innocent. With a sort of primal inquisitiveness, they explore their bodies and the different sensations they are able to arouse in each other, creating their own universe with its own rules. Soon, however, the adult world infiltrates as they acquire porno magazines, and the children move on to disturbing sexual extremes. Opening with a quote from Duras, Vinci carries on in Duras-like prose, sensual and intimate but eerily flat, preternaturally wise yet free of moral inflections. The trappings of childhoodAbrightly colored cereal boxes, school notebooks, rollerbladesAare presented alongside garish magazine spreads and blunt descriptions of sexual acts. The simple language and confident pace give no indication of the shockingly violent event at the center of this story, but Vinci's masterful sense of foreboding creates an intense anticipation of a crime that unravels as slowly and transparently as a tainted dream. Like Bataille, Vinci has created a controversial and frightening work that exposes the dark side of the erotic. However, its touch of sensationalism lacks Bataille's psychological subtlety and will leave readers bristling more at the brute shock of the tale than at its indictment of a perverse society.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

An insular world of sexual play and fantasy is explored with affectless and disturbing clarity in this 1997 first novel by a young Italian writer, awarded her country's Elsa Morante Prize.Vinci's protagonists and victims are five children, all living in a Bologna suburb, who surreptitiously furnish and meet in an abandoned shed that they employ as a play house. Following orders given by the oldest of them, 15-year-old Mirko, they peruse pornographic magazines and begin experimenting with one another's bodies, at first impersonally, attentive to Mirko's warning that We can't be like other people, do the whole couple thing: they must exist solely as a group, independent of the conventional world of their parents and schoolmates. But the introduction of sadomasochism and child pornography into this willful Eden turns their playhouse into something far more sinister, and the story segues--quite credibly--into dangerous new territory. Vinci has an unerring eye for the quixotic mixture of high energy, rebellion, self-consciousness, and ennui that brings such characters as the brooding Mirko, the younger Matteo (a gentle boy who, poignantly enough, prefers sports to their jaded games), and especially dreamy, sentient ten-year-old Martina (the focal character) vividly to life. But ultimately you don't know what to make of this accomplished yet opaque novel. Is it an allegory of incipient fascism? (Mirko's morning erection seems to him a symbol of omnipotence.) Or a muted lament for the passion (and the innocence) that lives briefly and perishes quickly (Sunflowers always go black in September, as if burnt)? Vinci efficiently immerses us in the book's amoral hothouse aura--but it's hard to care about characters who care so little for others or even themselves.One feels there's a more expansive, expressive story struggling to break through the rigid confines of this almost unnaturally poised and controlled one. Perhaps that will be Vinci's next novel. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First American Edition edition (June 6, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375404112
• ISBN-13: 978-0375404115
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,145,382 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sex among the 10-year-olds, July 30, 2000

By 

Theodore A. Rushton (PHOENIX, Arizona United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: What We Don't Know about Children (Hardcover)

This is a genuine horror story for parents, because it's as real as the possibility of your children and some of the neighborhood kids they've grown up with being out of sight for a few hours each day.

In brief, it's about a 10-year-old girl who becomes the playmate of a 15-year-old boy and his friends. It goes downhill from there. Fantasy? Not likely. It's real. A child does not have to be very old to play "Let's put the car in the garage." Kids are infinitely curious. This isn't a parable about what kids are liable do when they're left alone; it's a horror story about parents' fears of the modern world.

Back in 1954, at the height of fears about the Cold War, atomic bomb and the very real horrors from the atrocities of World War II, William Golding wrote "Lord of the Flies." It was about a group of British boys stranded on a desert isle who turn to utter primitive savagery among themselves, a parable of the nuclear age.

Now, the Cold War has gone away. In its place, we have blatant sexuality in films, on TV and saturating the ad industry. Lingerie ads in today's family magazines are more daring than explicit pictures would have been in "men's magazines" in 1954. Kids see it all; most ignore it, laugh it off or reject it. Some don't. That is the premise of Simona Vinci's story.

There was never any proof that `Lord of the Flies' could become real. No group of British schoolboys was ever abandoned on a deserted island to see how they would react without adult supervision. The premise of Golding's story was that all people are savages just under the shallow veneer of civilization.

Today, are 15-year-old boys left alone? Are 10-year-old girls in sight at all times. If not, what are they doing? Would you trust your 10-year-old with a 15-year old from just down the block? Especially one with his own motorbike. When did the game end and what took your kids so long to get home? When does choir practice end and how long does it take your kids to get home? How innocent are modern kids? Watch Jerry Springer or any of his clones to learn what kids know and do on their own. Remember, your kids are also watching Springer?

This isn't a "Forever" by Judy Blume, an idyllic picture of tender consensual sex among teenyboppers. It isn't about "Speak" by Laurie Haise Anderson, about a ninth-grader who's been raped. There are any number of fact-based books describing real life; Vinci writes a horror story, "this could be happening ..." Blume implies teen sex is wonderful, sweet, gentle and innocent; Vinci says 10-year-old girls can be used and abused by 15-year-old boys, and the result isn't nice.

In 1954, "Lord of the Flies" was hailed by critics and sold all of 2,500 copies in its first US edition. It wasn't until 1959, when it was published as a paperback and picked up by teens and college students, that became a runaway success. After all, it couldn't really be true. The same needs to happen with this book. It will make parents think, and to "talk" more than "tell." Could some version of it come true? Well, I've known of a dozen or more 12-year-old girls with babies.

Vinci wrote a fantasy, which could be true; but even she could be shocked by real life. "Lord of the Flies" has been on school reading lists for almost 40 years; it's time this book was added to the "thinking list" of parents.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars What We DO Know About Fiction, by fermed, July 13, 2000

By 

Fernando Melendez "fermed" (San Diego, California USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: What We Don't Know about Children (Hardcover)

First there is the title. In its original Italian it reads "Dei Bambini Non Si Sa Niente" which translates easily (despite my limited Italian) into "Nothing Is Known About Children." The British translation of the book is called "A Game We Play;" and now comes the American version "What We Don't Know..." A book so hard to title usually reflects murkiness of content, as in this case.

Critics (From London's 'The Independent on Sunday" and "The Evening Standard") have compared this book to Golding's "The Lord of The Flies." That is a flimsy and unsustainable comparison: "Lord of The Flies" is an exquisitely crafted novel depicting the social evolution and intrinsic cruelty of a group of children deprived of adults, while this is a poorly sketched novella of sexual experimentation ending in an accidental tragedy. The two books are comparable only in that they involve children being cruel to one another, which is hardly a unique concept in fiction.

While the prose of this book is remarkably appealing, the story that is told is at once too complex and too abbreviated, and its storyline too contrived and intentionally shocking to be taken seriously. The work cannot carry its assigned weightiness. There is no room in the book's scant number of pages (about 150) to pull off the type of deep characterizations needed to make the action verisimilar. Yes, children are quite capable of outrageous acts, but writers should lay the literary foundation needed for readers to believe that these particular children are capable of these particular (evil) acts. The book fails to convince in this respect, and therefore the sexual actions of the children are both grotesque and devoid of meaning because we (the readers) stopped believing in the story around page 25.

"What We Don't Know About Children" seems insignificant compared to what its author does not know about writing novels. The book is easily finished in one sitting, but even so I cannot recommend it. A brisk walk or a crossword puzzle are clearly far superior activities to spending time with this book.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Too Little to be Involving, October 22, 2000

By 

Jennifer Hall (Rockmart, GA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: What We Don't Know about Children (Hardcover)

There seems to be many things wrong with this novel. The main reason would be lack of character development. I finished this in an hour. Would I have cared more about these five children if I knew a little more about them? Or is that the point? Am I supposed to take the thinly described characters and mold them in my own mind? I just couldn't get past the fact that they were merely names on a page. Maybe the book lost something in translation, I don't know.

We begin with Martina, a ten-year-old girl on the edge of a cornfield, singing. Slowly we are introduced to the other four main players in their "game", but Martina is the only one who is of any substance here. She is the only one we ever feel anything for. The story of these five children feels like it could have been something more, but it is short and stunted.

The things they do to each other is grittily described, but with detachment. I felt the writer should have spent more time on letting us know the characters a little more. As it is, the story winds up too quickly and disappoints. While it is disturbing and unsettling, the end result is empty. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone.