L'enfant

Jules Vallès dedicated L'enfant 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 in doing so, he created something startling: one of the funniest books ever written about childhood suffering. This autobiographical novel follows Jacques through a gauntlet of cruelty: a peasant mother obsessed with social climbing, a schoolteacher father more concerned with discipline than tenderness, and educators who wield the cane as casually as others wield kindness. Yet what could be crushing material becomes, in Vallès's hands, a torrent of insubordinate comedy. The boy who should be destroyed instead becomes a survivor, learning not just to resist but eventually to love. Comparable in humor and humanity to Great Expectations, while foreshadowing the nightmare realism of Céline, L'enfant proves that the most devastating stories can also be the most defiantly alive.