The child - Jules Valles

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 Cline. Jules Valls, 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, Valls'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.