Childish Things (Sun & Moon Classics) - Softcover

Much fiction has been written about children, but little of it convincingly looks upon the world as through a child's eyes. Larbaud managed this trick in these stories first published in 1918. Although Larbaud's children come from a different world, the essentials of their childhood seem not at variance with those of ours. In one story, for instance, in which an industrialist's son spends a summer with the factory steward's two children, playing a dizzying course of games of conquest, Larbaud catches the frenetic nature of the capitalist's child's fantasy yet ends with playmates resuming the subservience deemed proper to their lower social station. The collection is full of such juxtapositions, which pit the innocence and self-absorption of a child against the menacing grown-up world and also evoke the lost world of the belle epoque while affording a sense of the childhood constancies of play, fantasy, and confusion. Larbaud has entered history mainly as Joyce's French translator. In this book, he shows a talent all his own that will be appreciated by those with a taste for the unusual in fiction. John Shreffler

The characters in Larbaud's collection Enfantines (1918), translated into English for the first time, are privileged children with murderously passionate inner lives their stuffy parents are utterly indifferent to. A young "little bourgeois sissy" falls in love with the village shepherdess, suffering such transports of despair that he maims himself in sympathy of his beloved ("The Butcher Knife"); a schoolgirl becomes infatuated with an older student and recognizes "from then on, there was a big secret in the world: mine" ("Rose Lourdin"). Larbaud's portraits are crisp, skillful, convincing: the last selection, "Portrait of Eliane at Fourteen," depicts the inchoate sexual rapture of a girl as she makes her first ecstatic declaration of love. The French author Larbaud (1881-1957) is best known for his Journal d'A. O. Barnabooth. Libraries that can afford to add this jewel to their fiction collections should.
Amy Boaz, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.