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Alessandro Baricco, Without Blood <\/i> . Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. 97 pages. <\/p>\n
Without Blood <\/i> , Alessandro Baricco\u2019s fifth book, begins in horror. Four-year-old Nina Roca hides beneath a trap door in an old farmhouse listening as several men murder her father and brother. Before the men leave, one, Tito, opens the trap door and finds her, but does not tell his comrades, one of whom sets fire to the house. Miraculously, Nina escapes the fire, and is discovered three days later by a bedraggled man on horseback. Decades later, Nina finds Tito working at a lottery kiosk in the Galeria Florencia. She invites him to a cafe, where she tells her life story and he recounts how the other murderers died in strange circumstances, perhaps or perhaps not the victim of Nina\u2019s revenge. She sees that her life has been driven by \u201cthe single desire to return to the hell that created us,\u201d believing that \u201cthe one who saved us once can do it forever.\u201d That \u201clong hell\u201d becomes \u201csuddenly merciful. And without blood.\u201d Lyrical and haunting, Without Blood <\/i> is told in a clean, crisp prose that one reviewer compared to haiku. It reaches toward allegory, and in its few crystalline pages probes questions of memory, loss, fate, revenge, and forgiveness. <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Alessandro Baricco, Without Blood . Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. 97 pages. Without Blood , Alessandro Baricco\u2019s fifth book, begins in horror. Four-year-old Nina Roca hides beneath a trap door in an old farmhouse listening as several men murder her father and brother. Before the men leave, one, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature"],"yoast_head":"\n