Review: Is there hope for man and his wretchedness?
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 4, 2012
Perhaps this piece of realist fiction can help professionals as well as laypeople understand the culture of addiction better. The story highlights man as a diseased species unable and unwilling to lift a finger to help himself in ways that matter. He is the cause of his own suffering and the suffering of others, he knows this, but is helpless to prevent it, despite his knowledge, despite his guilty conscience. His noble spirit emerges only when he becomes an old man, incapable of doing the harm his younger self could so easily execute upon the innocent and vulnerable. One has to wonder, did society fail this man and his daughter? Why didn't the child's mother report him to the police when she found out he'd been sexually abusing his daughter? Is big business behind internet porn to blame? Somewhere in the scheme of things, money is to be made off the weaknesses of others. Maybe that's part of the problem. One would think too that with educational potential as extreme as it is in our modern world, that these cycles of maladjustment could be broken, but why aren't they? Why did the main character in the first part of the novel become what he became? Was he the little boy whose neighbour seduced him into perfroming sick exercises through the chain link fence in return for gifts? Here was a neglect by the parents in relation to this child. The child grows up addicted to sex as a man, damages his own daughter who later suffers from problems directly caused by her childhood and the cycle is perpetuated. Stories like this one highlight the wretchedness of man but sadly do not provide a source of hope. Perhaps there is no hope for man and his wretchedness--which is probably what the author wants the reader to take away.