Child's Play

by David Malouf

In a sunlit piazza on an April morning, women throw buckets of water over the cobbles and men deliver trays of pastry to trattorie. In a barren room above, a fanatic watches, engaged in the details of his life's most important the assassination of one of Italy's most beloved men of letters.

In this penetrating novella, David Malouf, the highly acclaimed Australian author and finalist for the Booker Prize, plumbs the darker uses of our passions. Weaving a dense tapestry of sensual observation and personal events of mythic importance, he re-creates the frighteningly fascinating mind of a madman poised at his moment of truth. Dazzling in its beauty, intensely enigmatic, Child's Play conjures the mystical rising and falling of fear and pathos, where human idiosyncrasy and the incantatory rhythms of life give way to mania.

Genres: Fiction, Australia

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

David Malouf is a celebrated Australian poet, novelist, librettist, playwright, and essayist whose work has garnered international acclaim. Known for his lyrical prose and explorations of identity, memory, and place, Malouf began his literary career in poetry before gaining recognition for his fiction. His 1990 novel The Great World won the Miles Franklin Award and several other major prizes, while Remembering Babylon (1993) earned a Booker Prize nomination and multiple international honors.
Malouf has taught at universities in Australia and the UK, delivered the prestigious Boyer Lectures, and written libretti for acclaimed operas. Born in Brisbane to a Lebanese father and a mother of Sephardi Jewish heritage, he draws on both Australian and European influences in his work. He is widely regarded as one of Australia's most important literary voices and has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.

Reviews

[Karen· · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sober, precise prose, hard and sparkling and changing in the light. The effect is nevertheless sonorous and menacing and claustrophobic. A terrorist is minutely planning the assassination of a man of letters - why a man of letters? No indication is ever given, nor do we know a name. The terrorist is isolated in an office of equally murky characters, each dedicated to their own terrible task, never sharing, no communication. The crime is carried out, but at the end is it all a dream? Blossoms on fruit trees simultaneously with the apples, surely this is no world known to man? A disconcerting piece of writing, a consummate example of the power of words to irritate and perturb.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Child’s Play, David Malouf’s fourth novel, was first published in 1982, but it’s still in print. Although it is, like many of his other novels, focussed on the themes of ‘male identity and soul-searching’ [1] it is certainly a departure from his other early works because it takes us back to the days of the Bologna Bombing in 1980 and the activities of the Red Brigades. (Malouf lived in Tuscany for part of his early career). It’s a chilling portrait of a terrrorist, planning his attack, somewhere in Italy in a town named only as P. The young man who narrates the story has been recruited to assassinate ‘one of Italy’s most beloved men of letters’.
To see the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/201...

[Omar Abu samra · Rating 5 out of 5]

رواية ليست سهلة ، رواية عظيمة ، اكتشاف السنة ، السرد عظيم وينخر الاعماق ، يتجول داخلك ، يسطو على جسدك !

[Cheryl Walsh · Rating 2 out of 5]

One of the things that draws me to fiction is the exploration of motives. That's not David Malouf's purpose in this book, and so it didn't mesh with my taste. It was frustrating to read about a terrorist without coming to understand the purpose of his cause or what compels him to participate in acts of terror. The narrator was not completely anonymous, but the glimpses of his life as an individual apart from his current assignment just made me wonder all the more why he was committed to the terrorists' cause, and just what that cause was. Even if he was crazy, he would have his reasons for the choices he made. Without them, I can't tell whether he really is crazy, and maybe that's the point. But whatever the point, it didn't work well for me, though I admired some of the scenes and descriptions of settings.

[Andrew Wardle · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good novella and two rather disturbing short stories by an Australian author I've belatedly "discovered". "Child's Play", the novella, describes in forensic detail the preparations of a terrorist cell for the planned murder of an elderly famous author (no spoilers, this is revealed at the end of the first chapter).
The unnamed narrator/fanatic is portrayed as an educated, imaginative, sensitive and conscientious young man who, like his colleagues, is utterly devoted to his cause. We never find out what, in the currently-fashionable phrase, "radicalised" him, or what the great man of letters has done to mark him out for assassination, somehow increasing the power and menace of the plot.
Most of the "action" takes place in an anonymous rented apartment in an unnamed Italian city, in which the terror cell prepares. The narrator describes their activities as one would 9 to 5 office work - he is simply making meticulous arrangements for a "job":
"Our hideout as the newspapers would say (we call it an office)......." recalls Hannah Arendt's phrase about Adolf Eichmann: "the banality of evil". This is certainly "the banality of fanaticism".
The narrator muses throughout on the nature of history/news/truth. This is to be a very "literary" crime - not only is the intended victim an author, but the symbolic significance of the act will only become clear in its reporting:
"The crime will achieve its final reality at a point long past the moment of its occurrence in his life or mine: the point, I mean, when it is reported.......Its needing a famous victim and a perpetrator are merely the necessary conditions for achieving headlines and attracting the words: we are instruments for the transmitting of a message whose final content we do not effect."
"Of course the acts we produce have significance only if they are reported. But the very fact of their being reported changes them. As they pass into the public domain they.......acquire that deadness, that finality, that impersonal and isolating distance that belongs.......to history, to death."

It isn't possible to say much about the two short stories without giving spoilers, except to say they also speculate on the nature of personal experience, of memory and of "truth" - in quite a disturbing way.

One little proofreading issue: the narrator in "Child's Play" describing one of his co-conspirators:
"When her face is in response (sic) she has a faintly disdainful air......." Surely the intended word was "repose" ? I think we've established that Mr Malouf writes on a word-processor, not longhand. Spellcheck/Autocorrect claims another victim !

[perth dirtbag · Rating 2 out of 5]

I will always love the way Malouf writes; it's florid and atmospheric. With that said, this was a bit of a who-gives-a-shit plot. Perfect for fans of Catcher In The Rye, and I do mean that in the most insulting way.

Edit: You know what, that ending was very anticlimactic I'm knocking it down another star.

[Henry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't get enough of Malouf's florid yet clear writing style.

[Beky-Mae · Rating 2 out of 5]

Actual review of 2.5 stars

[Leslie Reiber · Rating 4 out of 5]

such precise prose

[Brett Warnke · Rating 4 out of 5]

A first-person account of an assassination. Lush, if not speedy. Beautiful, if a little ponderous. It’s a brilliant novella of twisted motives and secret plots that follows the radicalism of 1970s Italy. The victim? A famous writer the assassin greatly admires. There’s wonderful tension and a beautiful eeriness. The voice is fervent but charming as well as convincing.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm only reviewing The Prowler here, my review of Child's Play is http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/201... because I read that as a separate title whereas I read The Prowler in The Complete Stories by David Malouf (and I haven't reviewed that because I only had time to read two stories in it before it had to go back to the library *sigh*)
Anyway...
The Prowler is a curious story, playful about a serious subject. A calm, complacent suburb of Brisbane suddenly gets a prowler, one who sneaks up on women in their homes, sometimes naked, sometimes armed with a knife. He does not seem to hurt them, only frightens them, when the incidents rise to 100 a small squad is formed in response to community anxiety.
Identikit pictures assembled by police are shown to have a strange similarity, because the victims do not ever really see the prowler and so they create a sort of fantasy man. After a while people start to make jokes about him, and women leave their doors and windows open in defiance of him, or sometimes stand at a lighted window in the heat of the night, as if to say, 'No, not me'.
There are a couple of very veiled hints about who the prowler might be, but I think that the story is meant to be a metaphor for the nameless inchoate fears that beset us in city life. In our well-established houses in generally safe Australian cities, we fear the intrusion of the unknown and those fears often have sexual connotations.
But what of Malouf'a allusion to the armoury of weapons from the Capitoline Museum in Rome? It's a temple of unspeakable crimes left long after the criminals had gone. Is this an allusion to the terrorism that was cause for real fear in Italy at the time Malouf was living there?
Very thought-provoking, as Malouf's stories always are.

[David Gagen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Malouf is such a great writer. These 3 stories are so sharply written and strangely puzzling.