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Synopsis:
A new translation of an evocative, Huckleberry Finn –esque French bestseller about a young farmboy, the river where he is forbidden to play, and the adventures that ensue when he disobeys his family’s wishes.
The Child and the River tells a simple but haunting tale. Pascalet, a boy growing up on a farm in the south of France, is permitted by his parents to play wherever he likes—only never by the river. Prohibition turns into Pascalet dreams of nothing so much as heading down to the river, and one day, with his parents away, he does. Wandering along the bank, intoxicated with newfound freedom, he falls asleep in a rowboat and wakes to find himself caught in rapids and run aground on an island where a band of Gypsies has pitched camp together with their trained bear. Hiding in the underbrush, Pascalet observes that the group includes a boy his age, who, after receiving a whipping, has been left tied to a post. This is Gatzo, and as soon as night falls, Pascalet sets him loose. The boys escape in a boat and spend an idyllic week on the river. But then the mysterious “puppeteer of souls” arrives, bringing their adventure to an end, and Pascalet must go back home to face the music. Has he seen the last of his new friend?
Long hailed as a sort of French Huckleberry Finn , The Child and the River is, as Henri Bosco himself once wrote in a letter to a friend, “a novel very good, I think, for children, adolescents, and poets.” A beguiling adventure story, it is also beautifully written, full of keenly observed details of the river’s wilds, well captured by Joyce Zonana’s new translation.
Review:
Henri Bosco’s very thin novella, The Child and The River, is the story of Pascalet, a boy growing up isolated on a farm where he is allowed to explore everything as long as he stays away from the river. This only satisfies him for a short period of time before his curiosity gets the better of him. His parents are out of town, and he is left under the care of his father’s aunt, Tante Martine. She finds him only to yell at him before returning to the attic where she spends most of the day. Pascalet does not have anyone really paying attention to him, so after he has explored all that he can around the farm, he decides to check out the river. His excitement to see this forbidden place turns into an adventure when he falls asleep in an old boat and wakes up drifting on the river. The story has been described as a “French Huckleberry Finn”, but while reading it, I reminded me more of the scene in Night of the Hunter where the two kids take a boat down the river to escape Reverend Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum.) Of course they are running from danger of Reverend Powell whereas Pascalet is running from boredom but both have a similar feeling that when they finally get caught, they are in huge trouble. In both stories, the children do not know what is going to happen next, and there is nothing but adventure in front of them and trouble behind them.
The Child and The River is a short novella, only about 80 pages, and it feels like a character study more than a fully formed story. I like Pascalet as a grown man telling the story of when he was a child and floated down the river behind his family’s farm. We could feel the sense of wonder at all of the new things he was seeing, and the acceptance that there was going to be trouble when he returned back home, if he ever got there. I also feel the loneliness in the child, an isolated kid with parents that are gone and an aunt that is too busy with her own life to spend time with him. When he finds another boy, Gatzo, they become friends, simply because he is another boy around his age and someone to share his adventures with. The whole of the story is short and simple but very satisfying. There is the perfect balance between adventure and danger, exploration of nature, and lessons about growing up. Pascalet as an old man telling the story of himself as a child on the river is really telling the story of how he became the person that he is today.
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