Andrés Barba's SUCH SMALL HANDS

Not sure why but the book's mannered style distanced me from the plot and the protagonist, orphan Marina, instead of breaking molds, or creating a new reality, as Edmund White's afterword has it. There are certain advantages in rendering the other orphans girls as a collective "we," but so much else is lost. Individuality, for a start. The matter—childhood psychosis—is too slight and extreme to be treated as an ancient Greek Tragedy. It feels, instead, like a sleight of hand to avoid the difficulty of rendering individual lives. As any parent will know, kids have personalities as young as one year old. Structurally, wouldn't it have been more interesting and dynamic to weave Marina's recollection of the road accident into the narrative about the orphanage? As it stands now, the road accident at the start of the novel feels like a long prologue, and not Part One of of the tripartite organization.

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