Without Blood

Rating:
Summary: Engaging story
Review: Although I did not enjoy Baricco's lastest work as much as his best-seller "Silk", I found that the three qualities that impressed me the most with "Silk" - form, purity of style and language, and imagery - were employed with equal skill in "Without Blood."
Told in two chapters, each approximately 45 pages in length, "Without Blood" begins as the story of a young girl who witnesses the assassination of her father and young brother. The assassins, a man named Salinas, his henchman, known only as "El Gurre", and a young man of twenty named Tito, kill her father and brother, and then realizing that she mus tbe hidden somewhere in the house, burn it to the ground.
In the second half of the novel, an old woman seeks out a final revenge.
Like his work "Silk", "Without Blood" has a simple story. It is not the plot, but the immensely deep and tragic characters that make the novella great. The only problem that I had with the novella is during hte dialogue, Baricco inserts pauses that made it very hard to determine who was speaking, and it is only for this reason that I did not give it five stars.

Rating:
Summary: Engaging story
Review: Although I did not enjoy Baricco's lastest work as much as his best-seller "Silk", I found that the three qualities that impressed me the most with "Silk" - form, purity of style and language, and imagery - were employed with equal skill in "Without Blood."
Told in two chapters, each approximately 45 pages in length, "Without Blood" begins as the story of a young girl who witnesses the assassination of her father and young brother. The assassins, a man named Salinas, his henchman, known only as "El Gurre", and a young man of twenty named Tito, kill her father and brother, and then realizing that she mus tbe hidden somewhere in the house, burn it to the ground.
In the second half of the novel, an old woman seeks out a final revenge.
Like his work "Silk", "Without Blood" has a simple story. It is not the plot, but the immensely deep and tragic characters that make the novella great. The only problem that I had with the novella is during hte dialogue, Baricco inserts pauses that made it very hard to determine who was speaking, and it is only for this reason that I did not give it five stars.

Rating:
Summary: Good little fable
Review: This is a powerful fable of the personal toll war takes on individual lives. Baricco deftly explores how both sides of a conflict feel that what they are doing is right and for an ultimate higher good. The slight volume also examines how the personal aspect of war does not disappear once the war ends. In this tale, it lingers on in dangerous rage and ultimately futile schemes of revenge that beget more violence.