The Man Who Loved Children
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner
Condition remarks: Slightly faded on spine, small chip on back corner of jacket - otherwise fine, vibrant and structural. Take marks in FEP and back binding. Pages white and crisp.
A towering work of literary fiction, The Man Who Loved Children chronicles the slow, suffocating unraveling of the Pollit family through the eyes of young Louisa, a girl straining desperately against the crushing forces of her domestic world. Christina Stead constructs a portrait of domestic tyranny with unflinching precision, centering on Sam Pollit — a grandiose, self-mythologizing patriarch whose boundless egotism masquerades as paternal love — and his bitter, exhausted wife Henny, whose corrosive despair fills every corner of their crumbling household. The novel's tone is at once savage and darkly comic, capturing the grotesque rhythms of family life with a visceral intensity that few works of fiction have matched. Stead illustrates how power, delusion, and resentment operate within the most intimate of spaces, rendering the family home as a battleground where a child's inner life must fight to survive. First published in 1940 and later championed by poet Randall Jarrell as one of the great neglected masterpieces of American literature, it remains a profoundly original and emotionally devastating reading experience.
Description
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner
Condition remarks: Slightly faded on spine, small chip on back corner of jacket - otherwise fine, vibrant and structural. Take marks in FEP and back binding. Pages white and crisp.
A towering work of literary fiction, The Man Who Loved Children chronicles the slow, suffocating unraveling of the Pollit family through the eyes of young Louisa, a girl straining desperately against the crushing forces of her domestic world. Christina Stead constructs a portrait of domestic tyranny with unflinching precision, centering on Sam Pollit — a grandiose, self-mythologizing patriarch whose boundless egotism masquerades as paternal love — and his bitter, exhausted wife Henny, whose corrosive despair fills every corner of their crumbling household. The novel's tone is at once savage and darkly comic, capturing the grotesque rhythms of family life with a visceral intensity that few works of fiction have matched. Stead illustrates how power, delusion, and resentment operate within the most intimate of spaces, rendering the family home as a battleground where a child's inner life must fight to survive. First published in 1940 and later championed by poet Randall Jarrell as one of the great neglected masterpieces of American literature, it remains a profoundly original and emotionally devastating reading experience.
