Such Small Hands

by Andrés Barba, Lisa Dillman (Translator), Edmund White (Afterword)

Overview

The Guardian Best Books of 2017

“Every once in a while a novel does not record reality but creates a whole new reality, one that casts a light on our darkest feelings. Kafka did that. Bruno Schulz did that. Now the Spanish writer Andrés Barba has done it with the terrifying Such Small Hands.”— Edmund White

Life changes at the orphanage the day seven-year-old Marina shows up. She is different from the other girls: at once an outcast and object of fascination. As Marina struggles to find her place, she invents a game whose rules are dictated by a haunting violence. Written in hypnotic, lyrical prose, alternating between Marina’s perspective and the choral we of the other girls, Such Small Hands evokes the pain of loss and the hunger for acceptance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781945492006
Publisher:	Transit Books
Publication date:	04/11/2017
Pages:	108
Sales rank:	88,771
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.40(d)
Age Range:	14 - 18 Years

About the Author

Andrés Barba is the one the most lauded contemporary Spanish writers. He is the author of twelve books, including August, October and Rain Over Madrid. In addition to literary fiction, he has written essays, poems, books of photography, and translations of De Quincey and Melville. His books have been translated into ten languages.

Lisa Dillman translates from Spanish and Catalan and teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University. Some of her recent translations include Signs Preceding the End of the World , by Yuri Herrera, which won the 2016 Best Translated Book Award; Rain Over Madrid , by Andrés Barba; Monastery , co-translated with Daniel Hahn, by Eduardo Halfon; and Salting the Wound , by Víctor del Árbol.

Edmund White has written biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Rimbaud. He has also written several novels; the most recent is Our Young Man. He teaches creative writing at Princeton.

Editorial Reviews

02/13/2017
Orphaned when her parents are killed in a car accident, a delicate little girl named Marina is sent to an orphanage, where she finds a world as mysterious and forbidding as any alien planet. In time, though, she reshapes this microcosm into her own dominion. Barba’s prose is both halting and haunting; simple balanced sentences whose opacity hint at an underlying fear and wariness. The perspective moves fluidly from the other girls at the orphanage—“Everything around her was contaminated, and so were we”—to Marina—“Marina could see the pulse on their necks, their sleep smell”—and back again. A pariah at first, Marina begins to earn the respect of the other girls when she kills a caterpillar and its burial becomes a communal act. At a seemingly random moment, Marina understands that she is different, a staggering realization that gives her a strange sense of empowerment, and prompts her to impose her will on the other girls. This transition, in which she turns the girls into her dolls (“We were all lovers and the game was our love.”) is as unsettling as Marina’s initial introduction to her new home, when she was the prey and they the predators. Interpret Barba’s elliptical story as you will, but chances are you won’t soon forget it. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"Barba inhabits the minds of children with an exactitude that seems to me so uncanny as to be almost sinister."— Sarah Perry, the Guardian

"Barba is intensely alive to the shifting, even Janus-faced nature of strong feeling."— San Francisco Chronicle

" Such Small Hands is a magnificently chilling antidote to society’s reverence for ideas of infantile innocence and purity."— Financial Times

"Barba’s stunning and beautiful prose helps us realize that our adult incomprehension is not absolute."— Los Angeles Review of Books

"Each one of these pages is exquisite, and the end result is a perfectly expressed work that transmits the perverse and bizarre experience that is youth, where games signify life and death and where relationships are teased and pushed to the breaking point."— Music & Literature

"A lyrically rich and devastating portrayal of adolescent struggle."— ZYZZYVA

"A darkly evocative work about young girls, grief, and the unsettling, aching need to belong."&mdas; Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

"Barba explores what the dynamics of an orphanage reveal about any insular community and the trials of its inevitable outcast."— Idra Novey, author of Ways to Disappear

"Andrés Barba needs no advice. He has already created a world that is perfectly realized and has a craft that is inappropriate for a writer of his age."— Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

"In my opinion, Barba has become an essential writer."— Rafael Chirbes, author of On the Edge

"Andrés Barba is one of several impressive writers from Spain at work on fiction that brilliantly dissects the business of being alive."— Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times

"An unsettling, tightly controlled book."— Stephen Sparks, Green Apple Books (San Francisco)

" Such Small Hands is a stick of dynamite. Nothing like having your world rearranged in two sittings."— Mark Haber, Brazos Bookstore (Houston)

"I don't think I've ever read such a massively tiny book. A poignant and truly gratifying novel."— Nick Buzanski, Book Culture (New York)

"In stunning prose, Andrés Barba probes the fissures that words stitch together long enough to form a scar. Love, hate, trauma—they're tightly coiled in Such Small Hands into that most universal of scars, childhood, and the results, also like childhood, are unsettling."— Brad Johnson, Diesel, A Bookstore (Oakland)

"Andrés Barba's magnificent novel will haunt you, and continue to haunt you when you least expect it."— Caitlin Luce Baker, University Book Store (Seattle)

From the Publisher