Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #245208 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-10
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Review
"Contained in theses few page is a complete portrait of what it means to be human, at our most elemental, and the effect is awesome." The Observer; "It's a brief book but beautifully told. Anne Goldstein's translation preserves the subtle clarity of the original." The Times; "This is a fable for adults with its twin themes of revenge and redemption and fierce, haunting imagery. Baricco is the new Hans Christian Andersen." Daily Mail; "This book is a revelation, tightly executed, exhilarating and beautiful." Big Issue

About the Author
Alessandro Baricco was bom in Turin in 1958. He has written four novels (Lands of Glass, Ocean Sea, Silk and City) all of which have been translated into English. He is also the author of two plays, and two collections of essays.

Customer Reviews

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

Hidden beneath a trapdoor
A very short (87 pages) novella set in Italy just after the second world war, then many years later in a modern-day unnamed Italian city, this is a harsh, powerful story of a feud between the two opposite poles of Italian politics, I assume, between communist and fascist elements, though this is not made clear, and does not really matter.

It is highly atmospheric in its opening, in the Italian countryside, a remote farmhouse, a father, a young son and daughter and the arrival of a group of men bent on murder. Nina, the little girl aged about ten, is hidden beneath a trapdoor, the boy is sent to hide elsewhere. The man suspects that he himself will not survive and wants his son to rescue his daughter from beneath the floorboards, when the shooting stops. But the boy is courageous enough to try and save his father and is killed. The gang, including Tito, a young foot-soldier, are aware that there is a daughter and Tito is sent to search the house for her. He finds the trapdoor, but does not tell the others where she is.

When they leave, one of the gang is sent back to torch the house, and Tito is distraught - he had wanted to save the innocent little girl, lying in her hiding place.

Many years later an old woman and a lottery ticket seller meet in a city and give their different versions of this story. This second half of the story is less powerful, more muddled and indefinite. Nina survived, Tito is confronted, but their stories of what happened afterwards conflict and there is no resolution possible. The feud has ended here, and one senses the futility of lives lived in fear and endless retribution.

"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.