A Child Called It - Dave Pelzer

I hate my fingers. No I really hate them now. Barely a minute passes in the library when they start snapping themselves at the hard covers of best-sellers, directing my eyes straight to the book-jacket which more often than not results in another book staring at me, on the ever-bombarding reading-shelf. All this when I have been a victim of the perennial apathy (courtesy these very best-sellers) that has had me doused and sunk with sheer repulsiveness for literature time and again, that feeling when you just hate fiction for its ugly offsprings –when writings stink of mouldy mushrooms, rancid fruits and malodorous emotions.

If the overtly suggestive categorisation on the homepage or the introductory rant might not have conveyed, let me make it very clear that “A Child Called It” is just that— malodorous, rancid and mouldy (I’ll add a few more synonyms by the end of this critique, so just read on!)

Child abuse—doesn’t the very name sends the chills? The very thought of those daffodil-fresh-n-blooming kiddos being thwacked, smacked, choked, suffocated, assaulted, battered, abused, raped and molested again, and again… their angelic spirits all crushed, their innocent dreams, their featherbed aspires all slashed and stabbed in face by adults venting off their own suppressed desires, repressed frustrations--sends the shivers, doesn’t it?

What’s more unreal is that it has been present in all its fierce glory since time immemorial, hiding in that ‘closet’ with shelves fabricated of society-rules (just like so many other unmentionable and just-as-repelling lifestyles and behaviours), till the ever burgeoning and permeating media peeped into it, and the ever-segmenting law stamped it as illegal. Child abuse is indeed an ugly reality and with such a relevant and serious topic at hand fuelled by the fact that this was fact and reality coinciding with fiction, I embarked into reading Dave Pelzer’s “A Child called It”.

As the clichéd review-structure goes, a peek at the plot is mandatory (a formality here, if u ask me!). It’s a story, no-it’s a real life story depicting the darkness of the author’s childhood. The darkness in which his insane, alcoholic mother played tortuous games with him that left Dave “nearly dead”. It’s a tale of how Dave learns to play these games, it’s a tale of how he survives, labelled as “It”, stripped off from even the basic amenities, cut-off from the outer-world… its a tale encompassing years of struggle, deprivation and despair out of which Dave appeared victorious! Doesn’t this sound inspirational? Add to this the wonderfully photographed cover, a dashing title and a handsome caption “One child’s courage to survive”. Tell me who wouldn’t be lured into reading this “international best-seller”? I was.

Before I go about haranguing on the book’s content, let me type down the sole reason of why I gave this book an extra star. Throughout the book, though laced with inconsistencies, Dave is somewhat successful in creating enough sympathy for his childhood incarnate, which though isn’t difficult in the situations he puts himself into (his parents, his siblings, his friends and relatives painted in deep black that is!), remains the book’s only bright corner that makes an otherwise disgusting, over-exaggerated tale a readable one. The pathos, the pain and the plethora of emotions (rage, rebellion, deprivation breeding larceny, yearning to be loved and cared) that the abused boy goes through, at times strike a chord. Emphasis on “at times”.

What instantly kills the book in the genre it so valiantly tries to embrace is its exaggerated and stupendously inflated content. Supporting itself on the expedients of fiction, the author simply barges page-after-page-after-page-after-page-after-page of endless torture. No offence meant here (infact it was the nature of such abuse, on a personal level, that I wanted to delve into in the first place when I picked this one up), but when he wants the reader to believe that his shoulder’s tendons got displaced one day “I heard something plop, and felt an intense pain in my shoulder and arm” and then he went to school the very next day without being taken to the hospital, its saying something.

When he wants us to believe that he was made to drink ammonia and Clorox, made to sniff the harmful gas-cloud the two chemicals emit in a closed bathroom for hours together, made to submerge in cold water for hours (again!), made to skate over snow in just rags and most of all, that he was stabbed right into the stomach and still he survived, is nothing, but pure fictionalisation. All this only accentuated by the utterly dodgy first-aid tactics that followed the stabbing incident which went like “With the finger of my left hand, I pinched the slit…with my other hand I wiped away the pus”. And the very next para goes like “I willed the wound would heal..” And I thought “It definitely would…infections are a thing of past”.

The book seems brimmed with such medical ignorances and whims and fantasies which have been masterfully embellished on what must be a fraction of abuse in reality. The incidents might give you some chills in the first 20 or so pages, but the continuous re-iteration of the same horrendous moments in the same (not even similar) way translates to a tedious and exhaustive (and utterly useless!) reading session for the reader.

And that question of “Why” that hangs over you in the beginning still hangs after the predictable, happy-go-lucky climax (Didn’t he say it was a tale of human spirit’s triumph?). The sudden transmogrification of Dave’s caring mother to an alcoholic, perverted, beastly monster remains a mystery. And why this ugly metamorphosis only affects Dave (and not any of his siblings) again remains a secret. No help coming from any direction for a full 7 years from relatives, neighbours, police (all this when Dave’s openly attending school, playing with children) seems to distorted a fact to believe. What’s worse is that the author doesn’t realise that duplicating the same set of gory incidents over and over again, doesn’t chill, but makes it all seem like a joke by the end of it.

And it doesn’t interest one bit either, for Pelzer’s crippled vocabulary and below-commonplace level of language makes the book seem constructed around some 100 words (He’s offered an excuse here—this is a child’s viewpoint! Of course it might be, but its definitely written as an adult, isn’t it?) which simply fails the book when it comes to reader-friendliness. Storytelling, as well, is a thing of the past here with disjointed and clichéd sentences penned in unbreakable continuum. Couldn’t help but wonder how this book was published!

You know there’s this hypnotic appeal that comes wrapped with literature visiting such freakish realistic dimensions of life. A quiet sort of fascination generously mixed with sympathy on reading about somebody whose life is deprived of the tiniest of freedoms that we have pursued too enthusiastically. A Child Called It answers just that corner of hearts of probably thousands , but definitely not mine. For me it gives an utterly shallow, purposely sensationalised and minimalistic look to an issue so grave, so serious. Its not even decent enough to be a beginner’s guide to Child Abuse.