Translated by Lisa Dillman
I read this book in July, intending to review it sooner for Stu’s Spanish & Portuguese Reading Month, so I’m a bit late – but had good intentions.
Back in 2017, I read Such Small Hands by Barba, a dark and disquieting portrait of childhood bullying among young girls in which the bullies spoke as ‘we’, almost a hive mind. The hive mind thing is obviously a preoccupation for Barba, as his next novella also features a group of children who seemingly act together.
He sets the scene by introducing us to the narrator, a young civil servant who is posted to the fictional town of San Cristóbal in Argentina’s interior. He arrives with his new wife Maia, and her daughter, also Maia, his wife now being able to return to the town she came from. The opening lines are crackers though:
When I am asked about the thirty-two children who lost their lives in San Cristóbal, my response caries depending on the age of my interlocutor. If we’re the same age, I say that understanding is simply a matter of piecing together that which was previously seen as disjointed; if they’re younger, I ask if they believe in bad omens.
So we know from the outset, there will some awful thing or things to come. The narrator and his ready-made family have been there for some years when groups of children begin to hang around the town, numbers gradually building up. They beg for food and disappear again to who knows where in the jungle at night-time.
They’re a nuisance, but no-one knows where they come from or whose children they are. They speak their own language too, (although no examples are given, so we don’t know if it’s an ‘eggy peggy’ type with added syllables to confuse, or a Polari/Nadsat or other type). There’s less of the hive mind feel than in Barba’s previous novel, but they do seem to know each others’ minds.
One day it all changes. Now numbering over thirty, they’re hungrier than ever, and they rob a supermarket, but in doing so stab two adults. The town now knows fear. The police begin an operation to track them down, and all the parents are worried for their own children…
At first I was almost expecting a Midwich Cuckoos vibe, then it became more like Lord of the Flies, but having mentioned Nadsat, which Anthony Burgess invented for A Clockwork Orange, they’re also kind of ‘Droogs’, but younger, the supermarket stabbings being their first showing of ‘ultraviolence’! The town could have done so much for the children before they became a problem – they did nothing. Hmm.
Turning to our narrator: in his job previously, he developed a ‘social integration program for indigenous communities’ in a product specific farming project. The Commission asked him to reproduce it in San Cristóbal with their 3000 Ñeê inhabitants. He, naturally believes in his project, even if it has a dodgy premise. But there is a telling passage around page 30, where he is reading The Little Prince to his daughter and there is a passage which disquiets him, in where the Prince ‘tames’ a fox, and he compares the children who are untamed shoplifters. ‘They were children, granted, but not like our children.’ Us and them. Hmm, again!
I think I preferred the sharp focus of Such Little Hands to this novella which is more nebulous being told totally from one specific point of view. Again, however, Barba has written a disquieting novella that raises as many questions as it answers. I see that Lisa Dillman has translated a couple of others novels by Barbas which I must search out if in print, (she also does Yuri Herrera, whose novellas I love too).
Don’t just take my word for it – see Stu’ s review here.
Source: Own copy from the TBR. Granta paperback, 192 pages (plus foreword by Edmund White)
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I remember ‘Such Small Hands’ it had an intriguing cover and was something quite different to read, ‘disquieting’ that is it exactly.
I particularly loved the chorus effect in Such Small Hands, which I slightly preferred over this one.
Not come across this author before, but having read this review and the one you did of Such Small Hands I think his writing would be perfect for when I too am in a mood to be, well, unsettled!
Unsettling is exactly it!
First of all I am so impressed by your ability to hunt down those really difficult letters on your keyboard, lol! That kind of thing puts me off writing about writing in other languages. This does sound a challenging book and I seem to be having a wimpish summer of easy reads. There also seems to be a theme in the reviews I’ve been reading this morning of books that are too nebulous and so make the reader confused rather than entertainingly intrigued. It must be hard in a novella to do the kind of world building you might need for this complicated story. But then, in truth, I haven’t read much Spanish lit and what I have has been a bit confusing to me. I note your mentions of his previous book, though, and will mark that as something I might look for.
I have a cheat sheet note with the special characters on to cut and paste which I can email you! I loved Barba’s previous one a lot with it’s chorus and darkness – I’d really recommend it. I find that Spanish lit falls into the love it or confused by it camp – I have to pick carefully. Barba is in the former camp, along with Mexican Herrera, Argentine Pineiro.
I’m so intrigued by the premise of this one but I found Such Small Hands a bit forgettable.
Given your research area, I’m not surprised! There’s nothing supernatural here though, just weird… I really loved Such Small Hands – although I have largely forgotten it, I remember the chorus structure of the girls.