Without Blood by Alessandro Baricco
Requirements: 137kb, Mobi
Overview: Alessandro Baricco’s novels inhabit a country between myth and surrealism, marked by an understated poetry and an existential black humour. In spite of international success with his 1997 novel, Silk, he has retained a cult cachet.
Without Blood marks a return to the brevity and simplicity of form that made Silk so mesmerising and starkly beautiful. The landscape of the novel is almost recognisable, but lacks the hard edges of historical reality; the story begins at the end of a four-year war, but the factions are not named and no dates are given, leaving the story with the possibility of allegory.
Four men arrive at a remote farmhouse to exact a revenge killing on a former doctor accused of torturing enemy casualties. The doctor’s son is shot dead, but his daughter, Nina, is hidden beneath the floorboards; the youngest assassin, Tito, finds her, but spares her life.
Fifty-two years later, Nina and Tito meet in a bar in a modern city and recall lives lived in the shadow of their shared memory. Nina was rescued by a horseman and passed to a pharmacist who raised her as his daughter, then lost her in a card game to a count, who married her. Her life appears to her as a series of twists of fate; Tito’s story reveals the ornate fabric of deliberate intent behind every encounter. They are each other’s past and destiny. As they talk, it becomes apparent that Tito is the last of the four assassins and that the others have been murdered, one by one.
Whether Nina has sought Tito to kill him or forgive him remains hidden until the final page, but the climax comes as a visceral shock. Contained in these few pages is a complete portrait of what it means to be human, at our most elemental, and the effect is awesome.
Genre: Literary Fiction
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