Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #105185 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-10
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Synopsis
After her father and brother are brutally murdered, 4 year old Nina is left for dead in the family house. Highly visual and unforgettably sad, Without Blood is a haunting book about damage, longing, memory and forgiveness. Ann Goldstein's superb translation captures Baricco's effortless prose style and gives people in Britain the opportunity to experience this gem of a novel that has already delighted hundreds of thousands of readers across Europe.

Customer Reviews

"Without Blood - Without Poetry - Without Life"
After reading "Silk", followed by "Lands of Glass" and "Ocean Sea" it was with great anticipation that I awaited "Without Blood". The blurb on the cover gave great promise. I was surprised at the length of the work, a mere 87 pages. Certainly not a novel, just a short story. Now that I've read it I can see why - Baricco had nothing much to say.

"Without Blood" lacks the imaginative poetic lyricism of the other three novels I've just mentioned. The characters in those were slightly fantastic, eccentric and yet utterly human and infallible. Echoes of the imagery stay with you long after reading. In "Without Blood" I could find no real humanity in the characters. I could also not believe the 'voice' and thoughts of the 4 year-old Nina and felt simply a sense of detachment from her situation and that of Tito, her saviour.

I suspect that the problem lies in the time-setting. Baricco's other three novels are set in the 19th century - a period much removed from our own experience and therefore open to mythic interpretation. The difficulty in "Without Blood" is in trying to create a sense of atmosphere in the period shortly after the Spanish Civil War as well as the present day - it is far too close, too real to merge into myth, so Baricco failed.

This should not have been released as a stand alone story, but rather might have worked better in a collection of short stories. "Silk" and the other novels far outshine this meagre volume.

Quiet, understated read
I read this anorexic-looking book cover to cover in less than an hour and now, forced to try and shape my thoughts about it into some semblance of a review, I feel myself itching to read it again.

The story is essentially a revenge tale, although it is tempered by other human emotions, like love and loss, memory and forgiveness, and how we are all shaped by the events of our past.

It opens with a young four-year-old girl, Nina, being forced to hide in a hole under the floorboards of a country farmhouse in Italy. Here she is safe from the murderous men who brutally kill her father and her brother.

During the killing spree one of the attackers finds Nina's hiding spot but leaves her alone, a moment which we later find out has haunted him his whole life.

Later, when the story leaps ahead, we meet Nina as an elegant woman in her fifties. She has tracked down her 'saviour' and invited him for a drink. He knows that the two other attackers with him on that fateful day have died under mysterious circumstances and he believes that this woman - the girl from the farmhouse - is going to extract her final revenge. But he goes for the drink regardless...

Without Blood is a quiet, understated read. The prose is restrained, economic, minimal. Even the dialogue between characters is clipped and sparse. There is no extraneous detail of any kind, so there is nothing to get in the way of the story. Stripped down to the bare minimum, Baricco is able to demonstrate very clearly how the legacy of that one brutal day of violence has shaped the lives of the two main characters.

Ultimately, this novella may be an incredibly short read, but it is a deeply affecting one that packs a powerful punch. As someone who very rarely re-reads books, I'll be delving back into this one again soon to experience its subtle beauty all over again.

Exquisite
A jewel of a story, Superbly judged prose -- superbly translated . Less than ninety pages of exquisite story-telling that you could go back to again and again and find something different to reflect on each time. A tiny masterpiece