Patrick Musil Musil itibaren قصبية الزعاب، Umman
Haha, spoiled prince (with an angsty past OH NOES!!!) getting stranded on a nasty, dangerous planet with his less-than-happy bodyguard regiment. And as the book progresses, things change. And I love reading about the change. Not quite as good as the first one, but way better than the third one. The characters are a hoot, which is partly what makes this series! Second book of a four book series.
"Man's genetic inheritance is quite formless until it has been given a shape by social forces, yet the direction of these forces themselves may always be changed by the intervention of consciousness" (24) Fundamentally Marxist and existentialist argument against 'human nature' (and against racism (19), Malson's Wolf Children offers further context for the late 50s and mid 60s assaults on transhistorical naturalisms in Foucault and other thinkers. The roots of Butler's Gender Trouble, inter alia, can be found in here. Malson--better known as a jazz writer!--is irredemably humanist. Humans alone, per Malson, can be completely altered; only humans can really be said to use tools (32), to have true intelligence (and here he uses Merleau-Ponty), or to make gifts. The savage character of feral children proves the open character of human: it is not that feral children 'revert' but rather that they lack what humans need to be human, namely, a society of their peers: "deprived of the society of others man becomes a monster. He cannot regress to his pre-cultural state, because such a state never existed" (35). Without hailing, without the symbolic, without historical thrownness, there is no human, at least per Malson: "the search for human nature among 'wild' children has always proved fruitless precisely because human nature can appear only when human existence has entered the social context" (12). "Pure thought" no more exists than the "purely human" (18); there is no universal human nature, nor are there "naturally existing" ethnic differences. Truffaut clearly read this book: it's the basis for his Wild Child, but also includes an anecdote of a child surviving a defenestration that appears in L'argent de poche. The book includes Itard's account of Peter of Aveyron, taken from the 1802 English translation.
very nice book
If I can make myself read this book on it's own terms, it's absolutely fine and engaging. As an entertaining read for a tween audience, it even manages to hint at agenda and social change. It encourages integrity and genuine relationships and if it helps a teenager somewhere resist the lure of superficial soul-selling then it has succeeded indeed. I do, however, wish it had felt like more of a character-driven story. I never quite felt like I had a grasp on who this 1st person narrator really was. The ambivalence may be helpful or intentional, as a reader may superimpose her own personality here where there is so little of a personality revealed. Still, I am most fulfilled when I feel like I've explored a narrative where characters existed for much more than plot furtherance, and each gave me insight into myself. In this story, even the protagonist felt like a rather static character. I'm hoping that she'll grow on me more in the coming installments. I was engaged enough that I'm perfectly willing to give her the chance.