The story plays out in a place and time unstated. In the first section, a war has ended, though not for the characters of the book, who cannot escape the consequences of the conflict. Three men turn up at a farmhouse in the middle of a plain. Inside the house are a man and two children. The man, Roca, knows the strangers have come for him and hides his youngest child, Nina, under the floorboards. His son has a gun and is instructed to hide out in the woodshed. The children are not to come out until the men have gone.

The strangers have come for revenge. Roca is implicated in the torture of men at a hospital. The dialogue in this section is full of tension. The narrative viewpoint moves back and forth, from the father and the attackers above, to the girl hiding below, carefully arranging her limbs into a curled up position.

"If you are a shell, order is important. If you are shell and animal, everything has to be perfect. Precision will save you."

The ensuing shoot out results in the deaths of both Roca and his son. But the youngest of the killers, Tito, saves the young girl, by not revealing her hiding place to his friends.

Years later, a woman in her fifties buys a lottery ticket from an old man. She invites him to go for a drink. After initially refusing, the old man goes with her. He knows who she is. He recognises her as the young girl from the farmhouse. He also knows that both his compatriots from that day so many years ago have been killed. He believes that she has come to kill him; that the past has finally caught up with him.

The conversation between these two characters takes up most of the second section, as the twists and turns of fate that dictated the path of Nina’s life are revealed to have been manipulated by others. Neither Nina nor Tito can escape their past. The war and particularly the events of that day at the farmhouse have overshadowed everything that has happened since. For them, the war has never ended.

Baricco could have taken the easy way out and simply written a revenge tale, but that is not what this novel is about. Instead it delves more deeply into human emotion and psychology, but always in an understated way. It is this understatement that makes the book so powerful.

"When Tito passed the boy on the floor he bent down for an instant and closed his eyes. Not like a father. Like someone who turns off the light as he is leaving a room."

By cutting the action, dialogue and prose down to the bare minimum, Baricco offers no distractions, neither in description, nor symbolism, nor in the characters’ surroundings. Nothing is extraneous. He doesn’t lecture us either. We simply see the way the past has retained its destructive grip on these two people.

Readers often resent paying a lot of money for novellas, but this is a book that compresses a lot into its 87 pages. Much of the novel lies in what is not said. Certainly, it packs a stronger punch than many several times its length. It is a timeless study of the legacy of war and brutality on those who survive it, particularly the children.

RATING: 9/10 - A book to be read over and over

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Kara Kellar Bell is a 38 year old film and media graduate from the West of Scotland, with a passion for European novels, French films, silent cinema, and Brazilian music (everything from Daniela Mercury and other pop stars through to bossa nova). As a writer, she likes to have room to move around creatively, so she’s not located in one genre. She writes realism and also stories of a more fantastic nature, usually grounded to some extent in the real world. She also takes delight in writing across the sexual spectrum, and as a bisexual, considers it important to remind people that things are not always black and white, either/or, in sexuality or in gender. For a selection of Kara’s writing on the Showcase section of this site, click here

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© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.