Customer Reviews

Without Blood

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This novel is disappointing beside Baricco's Silk and Ocean Sea but is still well worth a read. The clarity and "rightness" of his prose continues to create very enjoyable reading.

The first half of the book sets the stage - a political murder of father and brother experienced by a young girl hiding under the floor. The second half is the meeting of the now grown woman with the one surviving murderer. What sets Baricco's handling of the plot apart from many authors is the surprising depth in his understanding of the psychological effect on his particular character. Her behavior is unexpected yet perfectly congruent with her personality. This raises the book from polemic into a fascinating study of human nature. It is well worth the short time it takes to read.

This time Alessandro Baricco decided to tackle a situation of real trauma, getting for a while out of his world of towns full of extraordinary characters and strange events.
"Without Blood" is another compact work, consisting of two parts, separated by time.

In the first part, a group of men tracks down and kills someone, who during the recent war was on the other side of the barricade. Unfortunately, he has two small children and they get involved - a boy gets killed, but a girl is spared and survives.

In the second part, the girl, now an old woman, has her turn to track down all the murderers of her father and brother and kill them. After years of hiding, careful planning and concealing her emotions, she does what she feels must be done. On the beautiful summer day she arrives at the lottery kiosk and meets the last of the group - the man, who secretly spared her life...

Although both parts of the book are in sharp contrast (bloody events at the remote farm versus a sunny day in the town full of people), they are both about revenge, about justice and about personal pain. Written in the characteristic Baricco style, clear and poetic, this is another of his brilliant mini-novels. It might not be equal to "Silk", but it is still a masterpiece.

This is a powerful fable of the personal toll war takes on individual lives. Baricco deftly explores how both sides of a conflict feel that what they are doing is right and for an ultimate higher good. The slight volume also examines how the personal aspect of war does not disappear once the war ends. In this tale, it lingers on in dangerous rage and ultimately futile schemes of revenge that beget more violence.

Although I did not enjoy Baricco's lastest work as much as his best-seller "Silk", I found that the three qualities that impressed me the most with "Silk" - form, purity of style and language, and imagery - were employed with equal skill in "Without Blood."
Told in two chapters, each approximately 45 pages in length, "Without Blood" begins as the story of a young girl who witnesses the assassination of her father and young brother. The assassins, a man named Salinas, his henchman, known only as "El Gurre", and a young man of twenty named Tito, kill her father and brother, and then realizing that she mus tbe hidden somewhere in the house, burn it to the ground.
In the second half of the novel, an old woman seeks out a final revenge.
Like his work "Silk", "Without Blood" has a simple story. It is not the plot, but the immensely deep and tragic characters that make the novella great. The only problem that I had with the novella is during hte dialogue, Baricco inserts pauses that made it very hard to determine who was speaking, and it is only for this reason that I did not give it five stars.

Maybe it (and his other works) works in the original Italian. But the language is so utterly stilted, the approach to storytelling so manufactured, so 'precious' in its final form...

...that I couldn't help but think of how it might end up as a 'Second City' or 'Fast Show' sketch. The possibility for parody is immense.

This makes me sad, of course, because his topics are so tender, so delicately wrought. However...

...it also makes me question how reviewers regard his work, lauding him endlessly, lavishly...and how this reminds me of art critics blathering about 'modern art', a streak of red on a canvas, five small dots on white, simplicity-gone-mad, all celebrated as 'masterpieces'.

Seeing as the Inner Ogre Reviewer is holding sway for this time 'round, I'll issue this challenge: I'd love to know if the author could (would?) write a 'standard' novel/novella. Methinks not.

As I've said previously: 'If you believe there's a direct relationship between published or produced works and Quality...or further, one between works that have not been published or produced, and a lack of Quality...you're naïve.'

Even taking into consideration personal taste and the myriad expressions of subjectivity in reviewing...come on.

Seriously; come on.

Baricco has a unique gift with words and an ability to enchant the readers with his stories. Every time I read one of his books I'm met with a new surprise, and it's always a pleasant one.
The main protagonist in this novella is Nina. At the beginning of the story we meet her while hiding with her family in an old house in the countryside, in an anonymous country, during an unnamed civil war, which however reminds us of the Spanish.
Nina's father, Manuel Roca, is not on the winning side, and he seems to have a lot of enemies, so they have to live in hiding to stay alive. But no matter how much they want to escape the past, one day it will catch up with them and the results will be devastating. Their enemies, headed by a man called Salinas, will track them down and a battle will ensue during which Manuel and his son will be killed. Little Nina however who during all this hustle was hidden in the basement will survive. And then...
And then the years swiftly go by, and there comes a time that Nina sets out to take her revenge. She's afraid of nothing and of no one and she's determined to spare no effort to reach her goal. And thus yesterday's hunters become today's prey.
Of course, as one would expect, in a Baricco story nothing is exactly the way it looks; the author seems to suggest that every coin has two different sides; but of course that doesn't mean that the one voids the other. At the end of the day what counts the most are the facts; it is them that write the history, it is them that engrave the souls. It is them thus that engraved Nina's soul, but they were not enough to completely rob her from her humanity, because even though she's out for revenge she's not willing to inflict more pain than the pain inflicted on her, while at sometime she reaches a certain point where she can stare with a clear eye on her enemies' truths. Besides, as we read: "You cannot dream of a better world and think that it will be delivered just because you ask for it." The world is what it is, the author seems to say, the past cannot change, but it's nevertheless worth the trouble to fight to make today and tomorrow a little bit better, a bit more humane.
This is a well-written novella about the recurrent mistakes of men and their eternal passions.

There are two books in Alessandro Baricco's lyrical novel "Without Blood", one to deal with actions and the other with consequences. These are separate stories, delineated both by disparate styles and by the actual print on the page, the first unravelling in italics, and the second in block. Yet for all their apartness, in time and circumstance, they move together in a lover's bond, toward a climax of heightened realization, and, perhaps, resolution.

How exactly would a young girl of eleven react to the onslaught of a group of vengeful thugs invading her home intent on some vague form of revoluationary revenge against her family for acts which may have been misconstrued, or not have happened at all? For Baricco the literary solution is natural. His heroine, Nina, hiding beneath the floorboards of her home while her father, Manuel Roca, endures torture and worse at the hands of avenging tormentors, becomes a shell. After hearing the "windows pulverize under machine-gun shots", she "checked the symmetry of her shoes, paired as if in a shop window, but on their sides, you might have said lying down, out of exhaustion. She liked that orderliness. If you're a shell, order is important...Precision will save you."

The gentle, poetic prose that Baricco deploys with such naive forthrightness stands in horrific, and effective, counterpoint to the violence playing out over Nina's head. Part of what makes the narrative so unnerving is that fact that we, as readers, don't know where or how or why circumstances have conspired to create this situation. It's a device Cormac McCarthy, among others, has used to keep the menace of the unfolding tale more incomprehensible, and therefore more frightening. It's a risky approach, because without context the story here could lose its way, become flat, even annoying. But Baricco's skills as a writer keep Nina's fate a compelling enough driver to make the bloody scene of part I explode off the pages like a Molotov cocktail.

The tone becomes more resigned, even elegiac, in Part 2, where we find Tito, the actual triggerman on the fateful night in question, working as an old man at a newsstand. He's approached by a strange woman, but one he feels compelled to follow. Again the tension builds. We all know who's summoning Tito to his fate. But what we don't know, after a lifetime of reflection on incomprehensible acts and unfolding tragedies, is what she wants, or what she'll do. And when the contents of her heart are revealed, it's hard not to be repulsed and fascinated in equal measure, before forgiving both Nina and Tito for what they could never control.

This is a very quick read, short, rhythmic, and multi-layered. Anyone with a penchant for poetry or taut story telling will find it a delight. And they'll likely emerge with their view of humanity skewed to just a tiny, subtle degree.

Alessandro Baricco is not only an author but also a musician and an actor. He won several literary prices like the Premio Viareggio and the 'Prix Médicis étranger'.

A man and his two children live on a outlying farm. The father is a doctor and since the end of the last war (in an imaginary country) he's known as 'The Torturer'.

One day four men arrive at the farm to kill the doctor and his children as a revenge. Nina-the youngest daughter-hides herself in the basement. Tito-the youngest of the revengers and a mere child-comes after her but he doesn't kill her. They look each other in the eye and a fatal attraction arises between the two.

Many years later-they are old people now-they meet each other on the street of a town and they decide to have a drink in one of the cafés.

This is mainly a novel about attraction and repulsion between a man and a woman. They wage war between them, not with weapons but with words.

Hidden in a small hole beneath the floor of the farmhouse, Nina witnesses the bloody end to a war which had torn the country in two. Salinas, the leader of one side, kills her father for the horrendous crimes done in his hospital by his side during those war years. The resulting fight leaves both her father and brother dead. However, when her hiding spot is found and left undisturbed by Tito, the boy who is with Salinas, her life changes in ways she is not expecting.

Many years later, now an elderly woman, she runs into the elderly Tito who is now a lottery ticket seller in a large city. Tito, the last of the three men involved in the deaths, recognizes her instantly. He has his fears of this girl child from his past, now a grown woman. She invites him to sit down and have a drink with her, and then tells him about what happened to her after he saved her life, all those years ago.

Without Blood is a short but engaging story. It examines the ways that war affects people, and how a simple kindness can bring strength when needed. The exploration of the human psyche and the way the story delved into human suffering and happiness made this small book a very engaging read.

I expected a story about revenge, after reading the first part, and was very surprised by the way the second part of the story unfolded. This was the second novella by Alessandro Baricco that I have read, and I look forward to exploring more of his writing.

Armchair Interviews says: Unexpected but welcome storyline.