Another LTROI Review

[metoo]

I learned by the time I was ten or so that it was useless (and often worse) to share anything with my parents.

There are hints in the novel that something similar was behind Oskar's silence towards his mum.

Now, I understand that it is very common that bullied kids don't tell their parents. This is a reason why it can keep going on for years.
Why is it that way?
Perhaps kids just don't want to bring home the hell at school. At home the kid can live a different life, be the happy child that his or her family knows. Someone else than the miserable one at school.
Starting to talk about it at home would taint that happy life, and that would be unbearable. Better keeping things apart.



About the adults' apparent ignorance:

The movie as well as the novel show things from Oskar's perspective. We are (almost) completely left ignorant about what the adults thoughts might have been - especially Oskar's mother. In that way she is treated rather unfairly, and we shouldn't blame her too quickly.

[sauvin]

I learned by the time I was ten or so that it was useless (and often worse) to share anything with my parents.

There are hints in the novel that something similar was behind Oskar's silence towards his mum.

Now, I understand that it is very common that bullied kids don't tell their parents. This is a reason why it can keep going on for years.
Why is it that way?
Perhaps kids just don't want to bring home the hell at school. At home the kid can be in a safe haven, be the happy kid. Someone else that the bullied one at school.
Starting to talk about it at home would taint that existence, and that would be unbearable. Better keeping things apart.

About the adults' apparent ignorance:

The movie as well as the novel show things from Oskar's perspective. We are (almost) completely left ignorant about what the adults thoughts might have been - especially regarding Oskar's mother. In that way she is treated rather unfairly, and we shouldn't blame her too quickly.

I think I may have shared in the forum on more than one occasion that I was born without usable hearing in one ear and with 'marked' impairment in the other. I'm much more deaf than hearing. Within a tiny handful of decades before my birth, it was apparently still common practise in that area to shut "feeble-minded" kids away. Feeble-mindedness was apparently shameful to other family members and to the general public, and there was no effective difference between hearing impairment and actual "mental retardation".

Shutting away feebs might (apparently) have been no longer commonly practised in my area, but hearing impairment wasn't well understood while I was growing up. It was, in fact, not understood at all. The only hasard my parents saw implicit in not being able to hear was in crossing the street: I was admonished sternly and often never to ride my bicycle on the street, and to look both ways twice when crossing it.

If you can imagine going to school where *everybody* speaks some really weird and obscure dialect of Hungarian, where nobody has the patience or the interest to teach you the language and where you don't even have the ability to learn (you can't learn what you can't hear), then you can probably imagine that I'd gone home more than once with clothes torn and face bloodied. After this happened more than a couple of times, they seemed to have pretty much decided that I was doing or saying something wrong to invite this kind of unwanted attention, and that I needed to figure it out. They became ever more exasperated as we moved around to different parts of town, and me attending different schools and still somehow managing to have precisely the same problems.

I think I was still in the fifth grade - ten years old, maybe eleven - when I taught myself how to make a noose. My parents never knew that, either, because by that time, I'd given up trying to explain a problem I didn't understand myself. I can't even begin to tell you how tired I got of them just throwing up their hands and saying "I don't understand why you're having so many problems - none of the other kids are having any problems figuring out how to get along with people!"

I don't think kids Oskar's age worry too much about bringing too much hell home. I suspect it's more likely they're not much inclined to make a hellish home life worse.

[metoo]

I don't think kids Oskar's age worry too much about bringing too much hell home. I suspect it's more likely they're not much inclined to make a hellish home life worse.

There are bullied kids who have a perfectly comfortable life at home, with caring and supportive parents. In the novel, Oskar definitely is one of those. In the movie, the tooth-brushing scene hints that this might be true there as well.

Even kids with good homes don't talk about their problems at school with their parents. Not because of having thought it through and having come to a conclusion that talking would make it worse, but because even thinking about it brings the unpleasantness of it up, and they avoid that. Or at least that's the theory I try to present.

[a_contemplative_life]

I think school bullying places the average kid in a cruel, Catch-22 situation. I'll use my own experience as an example . . . In elementary school I was a quiet, shy kid, but I enjoyed learning and I wanted to get good grades as my parents urged me to do. When I started getting bullied on the playground, I didn't know what to do because I knew that if I got into a fight, the school would probably punish me no matter who started it, and that my parents would be upset. This desire not to make waves and disappoint my parents was the biggest factor in why I endured it for so long.

I think the bullying also creates a kind of Catch-22 for the parents who learn of it. Their power to intervene is limited because they can't be at the school protecting their kid from the abuse. They have to rely on the school administrative staff, and of course that is an imperfect protection at best; clever bullies are good at finding ways to act when they won't be seen or are unlikely to be caught. The other dynamic driving the exasperation from the parents' side is that while you want to protect your kid, you also want them to become strong and self-sufficient. But the school rules against violence box in both the good and the bad kids.

I think the scene showing the interaction between Oskar and his mom after he is whipped on the playground is intended to tell us that there is an element of knowing blindness in their relationship. Oskar tells a lie about what happened and his mother buys it, even though there is good reason to doubt the truth of his report. Mom doesn't really want to know the truth, and Oskar doesn't want her to know it either. In a sense, they both want the lie because they are trapped in an unfortunate situation and neither one of them knows how to get out of it.

[Jameron]

As did Eli, to be with Oskar.

Such as ... ?

Such as; the emotionally painless life of only existing instead of the potentially life destroying event of losing Oskar's love ( á la I Am A Rock - Simon and Garfunkel), no longer being able to distance himself from the killing of innocents, certainty replaced by the unknown.

.

[metoo]

I think the scene showing the interaction between Oskar and his mom after he is whipped on the playground is intended to tell us that there is an element of knowing blindness in their relationship. Oskar tells a lie about what happened and his mother buys it, even though there is good reason to doubt the truth of his report. Mom doesn't really want to know the truth, and Oskar doesn't want her to know it either. In a sense, they both want the lie because they are trapped in an unfortunate situation and neither one of them knows how to get out of it.

Perhaps you are right, perhaps Oskar's mother should have doubted Oskar' story. Still, it was quite plausible, and why should she not trust her son?

The fact is that Oskar lied to her, for some reason. The novel gives us some important insights about why Oskar would not tell her the truth.

Here are Oskar's thoughts after having been whipped:

Mamma. Vad ska jag säga till ...
Som det var.
Han behövde tröst. Om en timme kom mamma hem. Då skulle han berätta vad de gjort mot honom och hon skulle bli alldeles ifrån sig och krama honom och han skulle sjunka in i hennes famn, i hennes gråt och de skulle gråta tillsammans.
Sedan skulle hon ringa Tomas mamma.
Sedan skulle hon ringa Tomas mamma och de skulle bråka och sedan skulle mamma gråta över hur elak Tomas mamma var och sedan ...

Mum. What should I say to ...
As it was. He needed comfort. In an hour mum would come home. Then he would tell what they had done to him and she would get completely upset and hug him and he would sink into her arms, into her crying and they would cry together.
Then she would call Tomas' mum.
Then she would call Tomas' mum and they would quarrel and then mum would cry over how mean Tomas' mother was and then ... My translation.

That far Oskar started to contemplate "alternative facts".

My conclusion is that Oskar's mother wasn't able to be as supportive as he needed her to be. Instead of being strong and able to comfort Oskar, she would end up needing being comforted herself. This isn't explicit in the text, but the only one there would have been Oskar...

So, he was better off not telling her.

Now, it seems that I am contradicting myself about Oskar's mother. Perhaps I am. Oskar's mother and his relation to her is one of the major things I want to understand, in order to understand what made Oskar leave with Eli. I cannot see that she was such an awful mother as many seem to think. Still, there is something, and that something contributed to Oskar's decision to leave.

I have been thinking of writing yet another version of the story about Oskar and Eli the night after the pool massacre. This is a turning point in the tale about O&E, very complex, and very interesting.

But first I need to make my mind up about Oskar's relation to his mother.

[gattoparde59]

Perhaps you are right, perhaps Oskar's mother should have doubted Oskar' story. Still, it was quite plausible, and why should she not trust her son?

Except we then have a parallel scene where Oskar lies to Eli and Eli immediately senses that there is more to this than a simple accident. Mom, I think, senses what was going on but chose not to see. Eli chooses to see what is going on and then comes up with concrete solutions, even if Oskar is not happy with the ideas. I feel this is an important distinction between Oskar's Mom and Eli, and maybe between Eli and everyone else in the story?

There are several passages about Oskar and his Mom in the novel. I like the scene where Oskar is freaking out about becoming "infected" and he begs his Mom to read him a story.

The whole notion of infection through blood is interesting from the perspective of this review and the point about bonding through blood and violence and revenge.

[metoo]

Mom, I think, senses what was going on but chose not to see.

I just read a few more lines in the novel, and there:

Oskar studerade såret i spegeln. Hur kunde man få ett sånt här sår? Han hade ramlat i klätterställningen. Det höll inte egentligen, men mamma ville förmodligen tro på det.

Oskar studied his wound in the mirror. How could one get such a wound? He had fallen in the jungle gym. I didn't hold, really, but mum probably wanted to believe it. My translation.

Later that day Oskar meets Tommy, who immediately assumes that someone had hit Oskar.

Later still, he meets Eli. Oskar tried, half-heartedly, to repeat his lie, but Eli didn't believe it.

So, conclusively, JAL himself seems to think that Oskar's mum should have seen through Oskar's lie. Then it is so.

[sauvin]

Oskar is also the child of an alcoholic. We don't know anything about his parents' divorce, but it seems reasonably safe to assume that his father's weakness for the bottle played a major role in his life at home up until it happened. I have known people who'd grown up under an alcoholic's roof: every single one of them have had some pretty severe trust issues, and every single one of them had zero tolerance for any kind of dishonesty (except maybe their own).

Do I make mistake in presuming that Oskar is an only child, that there had never been any brothers or sisters? If there had been, but died, then maybe there's some component of survivor guilt at work with his relationship with his mother, and this kind of guilt can be a subtle but very, very powerful influence on any person's emotional climate.

If there had never been any siblings, Oskar still is the child of divorce. We white-bearded folk in the US know just how stupid life leading up to and during a divorce can be, what with fighting over possession of the house and the car, the life savings, the kids, Fido. The name-calling, the screaming and throwing things against the wall, and maybe even trying to use the kid in games of emotional blackmail. Even if the divorce were handled civilly, I've read from many different sources that children of divorced parents tend to feel somehow responsible for the divorce.

[metoo]

We don't know anything about his parents' divorce

Well, we actually do know some about the divorce, if we allow reading the novel. Thus: Oskar's parents divorced when he was two or four (there are two different ages mentioned in the novel). Both ages would be too young for Oskar to remember much or any of it. After the divorce, Oskar and his mother used to visit his father regularly "at holidays and school breaks", until Oskar grew old enough to go by himself (by the age of nine).

Oskar's mother used to say that his dad was "childish in a bad way", that he was "immature and unable to take responsibility". She also said kind things about him. And she kept her wedding ring.

We also learn that Oskar had seen his father drunk before the episode in the film/novel, and that he hated it. What he hated most was that his dad became a different and rather unpleasant person when drunk. Oskar imagined a monster inside his dad, one that was called to the surface by the alcohol.

No siblings are ever mentioned; Oskar is an only child. He used to have a dog, though, which had to be euthanised because of some disease.

Finally, a picture of Oskar and his parents at Oskar's baptising is described. "The picture didn't show a family. It showed a boy and his mother. And adjacent to them a man, probably the father."