Contents
Every time something terrible happens, we try to find the answer to the question: why did it happen? Could this event have been prevented? The same questions are asked by the heroine of the novel, Lionel Shriver*.
Lionel Shriver is an American journalist and author of 11 books. She was born in 1957, graduated from Columbia University (USA), currently lives in London.
“We Need to Talk About Kevin” is a long story that culminates in a bloody episode: a high school student shoots 11 people with a crossbow, including his classmates and members of his own family. But this novel is not only about teenage violence. It is also about family life, what it is and why we need it. About how the relationship between a man and a woman changes when each of the lovers also becomes a parent. In this situation, the elders will have to find (or not find) a common language not only with each other, but also with those young people who, thanks to them, were born. And it does not follow that these new people are easy to understand or easy to manage. It turns out that parental power is a double-edged sword: children also have great power. For example, they can be our joy and pride, but they can also make us suffer, be ashamed and despair. Also, this novel (like all good books) is about love and the meaning of life and about the search for these things that are important to us.
Read more:
- “Grass” and teenagers: find the right words
Despair
“Desperate people often choose short-term relief in exchange for long-term losses.”
Punishment
“Only those who have a conscience can be shamed. Only those who have hopes or attachments, who care what they think of them, can be punished. Only those in whom there is at least a small fraction of good can be truly punished.
True love
“True love has more to do with hate and rage than kindness and politeness.”
Bad reputation
“Mark David Chapman gets fan mail that John Lennon can’t; Richard Ramirez, “The Night Hunter”, has destroyed a dozen women’s chances of a happy marriage, but he himself still receives proposals from women who want to marry him. In a country that does not distinguish between fame and notoriety, the latter is much more accessible. As a result, I am now surprised not by the frequency of public rampages with automatic weapons, but by the fact that not every aspiring American citizen climbed onto the roof of a shopping center with a loaded rifle.
Vandalism
“Most kids love to ruin things. It is easier to tear apart than to stick together… So destruction is a kind of laziness. And yet it is satisfying: I break, therefore I am. In addition, for most people, creation requires concentration, concentration, tension, while vandalism offers relief. You have to be a real artist to positively express lack of control. In destruction there is a sense of ownership, intimacy, appropriation… The motive for destruction can be nothing more complex than greed, raking, short-sighted greed.”
Read more:
- Survive a teenage rebellion
The Americans
“Americans are fat, tongue-tied and ignorant. They are demanding, domineering and capricious. They are smug and arrogant about their precious democracy and look down on other nations because they think everyone understands… and it doesn’t matter that half the adult population doesn’t vote. And they are also boastful. Believe it or not, it’s considered rude in Europe to pour out on new acquaintances that you went to Harvard and own a big house, and how much it costs, and what celebrities come to you for dinner. And it doesn’t even occur to Americans that somewhere it’s considered completely unacceptable to report your addiction to anal sex to a person you met five minutes ago at a party … Because the whole concept of personal life is turned upside down here. That is why American credulity turns into a flaw, and naivety comes to stupidity. And worst of all, they have no idea that the rest of the world can’t stand them.”
Why do people have children
“I often come back to a remark you made…before we became parents. “At least the child is the answer to the Big Question.” However, if there were no reasons to live without a child, where would the reasons to live with a child come from? To answer someone’s life with a later life is simply to shift the burden of finding purpose to the next generation. This postponement amounts to a cowardly and potentially endless delay. Your children’s response will probably also be to procreate, and therefore to impose their own meaninglessness of existence on their offspring.”
Parent Affairs
“I suspect that children want to keep their parents busy; they don’t want their parents to fill up their schedules with their petty needs. Children crave the certainty that there are other things to do, important things, sometimes more important than themselves.”
* L. Shriver “We need to talk about Kevin”, in Russian translation “The price of dislike” (Tsentrpoligraf, 2009).