Helpless Youth

I have so far read three volumes of Karl Ove Knausgaard's autobiographical novel.  It is a treat to read about young boys and their adventures, especially for me, who was never a young boy like that, if only because my accident took away the wild mobility that boys once upon a time enjoyed.  The other side to his account of his youth is the prison of his home where his exceedingly angry and cruel martinet of a father ran a tight ship, and meted out severe physical punishments for the slightest infractions.  It was a place to walk about about always in fear.  For those of us who grew up in a considerably more relaxed environment it reads like days in the gulag.  I think of my own children growing up much more loosely and one anecdote always comes to mind.  I came home one night around ten to find the table laden with dirty dishes, evidence of a large scale party, and indeed as it turned out my son, then fourteen, who later became a successful chef, had invited a bunch of his boy pals to a dinner party.  There were goblets with the remnants of the wine, their were the ash trays with the finished cigars, there were the dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, the pots and pans.  This had been a banquet.  Not a sound in the house.  I walked upstairs and went to my sons' quarters, turned to their bathroom where the light was on.  I spied a figure stretched out on the floor with the bathmat on top of him, a boyish looking person so clearly one of the guests.  I knelt down to say "Hello, I'm Charles Beye, Willis's father.  Can I help you?" and from under the bath mate the muffled voice "This is Willis Beye. Go away." I am also reading the trilogy by Elena Ferrante describing a Neapolitan youth in the slums of Naples right after the Second World War.  It is the account of one girl's voyage away from the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness of people who only spoke dialect and thus were imprisoned in their ghetto and her friend who was left behind, always presumed to be the brighter, but clearly more self destructive.  The descriptions of the rituals of this slum world, the fierce demands of family, the male sense of power and domination, of sexual predation, all in the name of "love," is an ugly story.  The narrator who is the girl who got away is excellent at describing her fear in social situations, her ignorance, her continued timidity as she rises in social class through her use of Italian instead of dialect, her education, her success as an author.  The complete disconnect with the world of her parents, yet her occasional encounters with them, is a marvelous story; they are so brutal, demanding and determined to misunderstand her in every way.  American novelists never seem able to write about the world of poverty, hopelessness, ignorance, anger, and impotence with this kind of secure pitiless vision.  It is another kind of growing up from what we most of us know.