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Original Title:	The Man Who Loved Children
ISBN:	0312280440 (ISBN13: 9780312280444)
Edition Language:	English
Characters:	Sam Pollit, Henny Pollit, Louie Pollit
Setting:	United States of America

The Man Who Loved Children

Christina Stead

Paperback | Pages: 527 pages

Rating: 3.57 | 3862 Users | 444 Reviews

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Title	:	The Man Who Loved Children
Author	:	Christina Stead
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Deluxe Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 527 pages
Published	:	July 6th 2001 by Picador Paper (first published 1940)
Categories	:	Fiction. Classics. Cultural. Australia. Novels

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Gentle warning note added here because it seems fans of this book can find the below review a little disheartening. So if you're a fan, you might want to skip this review. But, everybody knows that one reader's dogpile is another reader's marzipan souffle with attendant hummingbirds. I myself cannot conceive of anyone reading this haemorrhaging fount of bullying bilious babytalk and not be crying for mercy by page 134. Why would anyone persist? People love this book. Me, I hated it like poison.

Original review:


I finally got to the SLAP moment. What is the SLAP moment? It is when you are reading a longish book and thinking you hate the fucking thing but it’s not quiiiiiiiiiite bad enough to say THAT’S ENOUGH and there are these great billowing clouds of praise for this thing urging you onwards and you’re looking, looking for the scene, the page, the paragraph which will make you stop dead and say THUS FAR AND NO FARTHER…. It finally happened to me in my reading of The Slap, so now I call it a SLAP moment.

In The Slap it was the scene where Gary, the sex-starved husband, is wrestling with his young son for control of the mother’s breasts – please feel free to check my review which goes into some detail, but have a sick bag handy. In The Man who Loved Children, the SLAP moment arrived on page 133-134. It’s worth discussing in detail because this is a very well-loved book and I feel like a right pillock in not being able to join with the glad band of happy four and five star bestowers. I feel I’ve let the side down. I don’t feel good.

But fucking hell, guys, seriously?

You’ll all know that this long novel is about a husband named Sam who hates his wife Henny who returns the hatred with interest. Between them they have 6 children. The novel is about this family. Everyone uses the word “dysfunctional” to describe this family but I think that word, along with “subversive”, should be retired to the Home for Worn-Out Words because never have I heard a family described as “functional” and if one was the members thereof would probably feel mildly insulted, so “dysfunctional” is another horrible modern cliché, let’s find a different word.
Vast swathes of this novel are about the insufferably pompous, all-knowing, all-self-regarding, all-put-upon, all-martyred, all-wise father Sam and his creepy babytalk with the kids. Other swathes are Henny’s sudden diatribes about how she wants to kill Sam, boil the children and throw herself in the Potomac. At least I could get behind Henny’s sentiments, because if I was her, I’d be thinking the same thing.

I have read too many novels which describe in detail some insufferable male and his Everest- sized ego, from I the Supreme to John Hawkes’ Travesty to The Book of Evidence to Money and I don’t need another one, but especially when they indulge in this pukesome babytalk. Sam the father is speaking to his 11 year old daughter. The words in [brackets] are in the text.

“Will you miss your poor little dad?”
“Yes,” she lowered her eyes in confusion.
“Bring up your tea, Looloo-girl : I’m sick, hot head, nedache [headache], dot pagans in my stumjack [got pains in my stomach]: want my little fambly around me this morning. We’ll have a corroboree afterwards when I get better. Mother will make the porridge.”

You see she has to translate the babytalk as she goes along. So this stuff gets going very early on and you have to be pretty iron-willed to plough through it. I kept repeating the mantra “neglected modern classic”.

But it doesn’t stop. Sam never shuts up. He’s supposed to be going off on a nine month foreign trip but by page 134 he’s still there. In fact only 48 hours has passed since page 1. Yeah. So here’s where I stopped.

He’s talking to 11 year old Louise again and explaining exactly how and why her mother and father hate each other, in the course of which Louise queries Sam’s relativism in regard to the act of murder :

“The Polynesians don’t think it’s murder: you said so. Old women collect money, then they get a young man to murder them and bury them. You said so. You said, it doesn’t matter if the people in the country don’t mind it.”
“Oh! Yes I did say that, Looloo, murder depends upon the meridian, so to speak : the thousand and one tables of morality (when we objectively consider the facts of ethnic mores), teach us not to be hidebound about our own little prejudices, even in law. Consider what is supposed to be a heinous offence, murder. Now call it war, and it becomes a patriotic duty to urge other people to go and murder and be murdered. Foolish old Jo, who is a goodhearted woman, sent dozens of white feathers during the Late Unpleasantness or, in other words, desired young men to go and be murdered. En she could hev done with a young man herself: it was a combination of the sacred folly of race suicide, wilful sterility, and murder. En ebblyone thought Jo was a big gun of patriotism : I bleeve your little foolish Aunt Jo will get herself ‘lected to the DAR’s yet – she’s bin and discovered a Pollit what had no more sense than to go and fight long time ago…Now, wimmin is prone to murder. In wicked old Europe still, you get the village witch planning to murder husbings for them wives what is a bit tired of making coffee for the old man.”

There are pages of shite like this. What are we to make of it? That Sam is a monstrous parent, yes. That he just uses his kids to broadcast monologues on all frequencies because he’s in love with his own voice, yes. That the kids themselves love him in spite of his egregiousness, yes. That this is in any tiny shred of a way representative of the real world? I hope not. He segues from patronising this 11 year old girl with babytalk to pontificating way above her head and back again. Okay we get this point, he’s awful. But by page 134 this same point had been made about 134 times. I did not wish to listen to another word. I wanted Looloo to turn into Hayley Stark in Hard Candy and lash him to a chair and threaten to chop his goolies off. Anything to stop that endlessly gurgling crap.



"Shut the fuck up, jackass."

Rating About Books The Man Who Loved Children

Ratings: 3.57 From 3862 Users | 444 Reviews

Evaluate About Books The Man Who Loved Children

Amazing gut-wrenching novel about a family consisting of a mother who is desperately unhappy, a father who is a Peter Panish lunatic who can't even make himself a cup of coffee, and a multitude of children who are at their parents mercy. The two engage in epic quarelling bouts, that border on the Shakespearean. The eldest daughter is the most aware and we see her slowly carving out an identity removed from her crazed parents. Written in a poetic, at times elegaic prose, Stead's novel is an

I both loved and hated this book, which is fitting since it's about family! So I totally understand anybody who gives this book one star, or even abandons it. You're thrown into a large family and asked to accept things as normal which you know are not, the way the many children in the family do, simply because its the only way things have always been. Meanwhile, nothing happens for the first 150-ish pages. Youre just stuck inside of the worst hell with the most insufferable pieces of shit. A

The Man Who Loved Children has long been one of my mother's favourite books, and a well-thumbed, dog-eared copy is one of my most vivid memories from childhood. And yet, somehow, I wasn't ever quite ready to read it until recently. Perhaps now I have finally stopped believing in bogeymen and monsters hiding in cupboards, and could read with some sense of detachment. There is something in Sam Pollit, a man who drags his wife and children through the most extreme of poverty, that hits close to

The one prominent critical Goodreads review of this book is by someone who gave up on it around page 130, which makes sense, because at that point I was sorely tempted to give it up myself. Sheer bloody-mindedness compelled me to continue. I'm so glad that I did. This book grows on you slowly, and, in adjusting you to the sharply realised Pollit crew, demands your complete emotional investment.The titular character is the immensely annoying patriarch, Sam, the prime factor in one's desire to put

Two days after having read The Man Who Loved Children and I'm finally settling down. I don't think I've ever changed a 1 star review to a 5 star review before, but there it is. I've moved from feeling "this is a brilliant book, but I hate it" to feeling: "I may hate this book, but it's brilliant."More than any read I can remember, this novel made me feel dreadfully insecure about my role as a parent. I've decided that is interesting and amazing rather than something to blame it for. The parents

It's a travesty that this novel isn't one of those twentieth-century classics that everyone's heard of and has either read or knows they must read, like "The Sound and the Fury" or "Ulysses." Sure, people, praise it, but in the same way that Jonathan Franzen praises Alice Munro: with patronizing awe, not peerage. I don't know that Christina Stead ever wrote anything nearly as good, but "The Man Who Loved Children" is epic and brilliant -- strange, gorgeous, devastating, hilarious, flawed,

I found this book difficult to get into because I began with the introduction. I found it almost unreadable and started it twice before I gave up and just dove into the book. (which was a good thing because the into contained major spoilers).But as soon as I did, I was hooked. I've never read a book that brought back memories of my own childhood in such a rush as this book did. From the sing-songy lingo of baby-talk and pet names Sam uses to control his children (bringing back the forgotten