CANR
WORK TITLE: The Right Intention
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Muniz, Andres Barba
BIRTHDATE: 1975
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Spanish
LAST VOLUME:
http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=592; http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9s_Barba; INTERVIEW (in Spanish) http://www.elmundo.es/encuentros/invitados/2004/03/1021/ * * http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/11/03/all-writers-have-a-corpse-in-their-closet-an-interview-with-andres-barba/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1975, in Madrid, Spain.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Worked as a teacher of Spanish to foreigners at Complutense University, Madrid, Spain; conducts writing workshops.
AWARDS:Torrente Ballester Prize, 2005, for Versiones de Teresa; Juan March Prize, 2010, for Muerte de un caballo; Premio Herralde, 2017, for República luminosa.
WRITINGS
Also author of essays, poems, books of photography, books for children, and translations of Thomas De Quincey and Herman Melville.
La Hermana de Katia was adapted for film.
SIDELIGHTS
Andrés Barba is an award-winning Spanish novelist and author of essays, poems, children’s books, and photography books. He is also a translator of English novels into Spanish. His debut novel, La Hermana de Katia, which means “Katia’s Sister,” is narrated by an adolescent girl in Madrid who lives with her sister, Katia, and her prostitute mother. The narrator remains unnamed but presents her view of the harsh world around her, from prostitution to drug addiction. The narrator also ponders issues such as religion and death.
Katia, the narrator’s sister, is a stripper; the sisters’ mother disappears from home for long stretches. Also on hand is the grandmother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. Katia’s sister, however, still sees the world through a somewhat innocent perspective as she admires the tourists, whom she sees as charming. “I am … astounded by the heart-breaking tenderness and naked honesty of Barba’s prose,” wrote a Three Percent Web site contributor, who went on to note that La Hermana de Katia “is a remarkable first book from a very young writer who has gone on to prove his mettle in subsequent novels.”
In Rain over Madrid, published in English translation in 2014, Barba presents four novellas. The first novella, “Fatherhood,” revolves around a father in Madrid who uses his musical talent to seduce women and seems to have little interest in providing either emotional or financial support for his son. By the end of the story, the man seems to have an epiphany concerning fatherhood, but it remains questionable whether or not he will follow through on the insight. In “Fidelity,” the story revolves around a father’s womanizing and his seventeen-year-old daughter’s own sexuality.
The story “Guile” revolves around a middle- aged woman whose mother is slowly dying. The two have a strained relationship, but the protagonist does form a relationship with Anita, who works as her mother’s caretaker and acts as a sort of intermediate for the protagonist, protecting the woman from truly confronting her mother’s demise. After the mother dies, the protagonist encounters Anita several years later, but Anita wants little to do with her, eventually leading the woman to confront her grief over her mother’s death.
The final tale, “Shopping,” tells the story of a woman who goes Christmas shopping with her beautiful and domineering mother, Nelly. As the woman recalls her late father, she views him as a saint, but by the end of the story her views of both her mother and father undergo a drastic change. “Character, Barba reminds us, is nothing but a fabrication of perspective,” wrote Music & Literature Web site contributor Alex McElroy, who went on to comment on the various characters in the collection, noting: “The depraved, selfish, and violent thoughts that drive his characters are not deviant thoughts, but disturbingly normal: his characters are all too human in their vanity, cruelty, and naked love.” A Publishers Weekly Online contributor noted Barba’s “exquisite craftsmanship.”
Barba’s novel titled August, October features fourteen-year-old Tomás in a coming- of-age story. Tomás is on summer vacation at the beach with his wealthy family. He is at the age where he is trying to come to terms with life around him, including the idea of sex and friendships, the changing view of his parents, and the bad behavior of other kids he meets while on vacation. However, during the vacation, Tomás becomes mixed up in the sexual assault of a girl along with four of his newfound, lower-class friends. The novel follows Tomás as the vacation ends and he returns home, racked with guilt and seeking redemption.
August, October “is a … novel that can be captivating and possesses many strengths,” wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor. Eileen Battersby, writing for the Irish Times Online, remarked: “ August, October is beyond impressive, it is the real thing, a study of how the mind and memory attempts to make sense of emotion and guilt; need and regret.”
In the novel Such Small Hands Barba explores the conceptual universe of an orphaned girl who slowly morphs from a tormented outsider to the center of the institution where she lives. “Such Small Hands tells the story of Marina, a young girl who moves to an orphanage having lost her parents in a car crash,” explained Josie Mitchell in her introduction to a Granta Online interview with the author. “Her arrival creates a strange tension among the other girls, and the behaviour of the children becomes increasingly dark and ominous.” “After the accident, the psychologist treating Marina gives her a doll,” wrote Lucy Scholes in the Financial Times, “but the girls at the orphanage tear the toy’s limbs from its body and bury them in the playground. Soon after, Marina invents a creepy night-time game for everyone to play … [in which] the girls take it in turns to pretend to be the doll:” “This transition, in which she turns the girls into her dolls,” stated a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “… is as unsettling as Marina’s initial introduction to her new home.”
Critics found Barba’s novel both powerful and chilling. “This is as effective a ghost story as any I have read, but lying behind the shocks is a meditation on language and its power to bind or loosen thought and behavior,” declared Sarah Perry in the London Guardian. “Since Marina and the girls cannot verbalise the intense confusion of their feelings, they resort to expressing them by altogether more direct means. Only when they are plainly told what they have done do they begin to think they have transgressed.” “Whether he’s writing about teenage girls in an anorexia treatment center or a man literally running away from his marriage, whether the story is creepy and enthralling or bordering on dull,” stated Emma Ramadan in Full Stop, “Barba’s undeniable skill lies in crafting convincing characters that feel like friends, or like enemies, or like people you hope never to meet, whose downfalls feel dangerously possible.”
In the collection of novellas translated as The Right Intention, Barba presents studies of four characters that “are destructive, lonely, obsessive,” wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor. “These plots are deceptively simple. What’s not simple are the characters themselves, the ways that they struggle, and yearn, and fall down.” In one novella a teenaged girl responds to an unwanted kiss by becoming anorexic; in another, a middle-aged gay man sabotages his relationship with a younger partner. “Barba’s stories,” concluded Jeff Tompkins on the Words without Borders website, “are a bracing reminder that we were finding plenty of ways to torment ourselves long before the latest technologies made it so much easier for us.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Financial Times, August 11, 2017, Lucy Scholes, review of Such Small Hands.
Guardian (London, England), August 26, 2017, Sarah Perry, review of Such Small Hands.
Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 2015, review of August, October; March 1, 2018, review of The Right Intention.
New Statesman, September 8, 2017, review of Such Small Hands, p. 41.
Publishers Weekly, 13 February 13, 2017, review of Such Small Hands, p. 44.
Times Literary Supplement, August 29, 2017, “Twenty Questions with Andrés Barba.”
ONLINE
El Mundo Online, http: //www.elmundo.es/ (March 25, 2014), “Ha estado con nosotros … Andrés Barba,” author interview.
Full Stop, http://www.full-stop.net/ (March 6, 2018), Emma Ramadan, review of Such Small Hands and The Right Intention.
Granta Online, http:// granta.com/ (June 22, 2016), author profile; (November 6, 2017), Josie Mitchell, “Andrés Barba on Such Small Hands.“
Irish Times Online, http://www.irishtimes.com/ (October 3, 2015), Eileen Battersby, “August, October by Andrés Barba: Brilliantly Dissects the Business of Being Alive.”
Music & Literature, http://www.musicandliterature.org/ (October 26, 2015), Alex McElroy “Andrés Barba’s August, October & Rain over Madrid. ”
Paris Review Online, http://www.theparisreview.org/ (November 3, 2015), Jonathan Lee, “All Writers Have a Corpse in Their Closet: An Interview with Andrés Barba.”
Publishers Weekly Online, http://www.publishersweekly.com/ (June 22, 2016), review of Rain over Madrid.
Three Percent, http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/ (June 22, 2016), review of La Hermana de Katia.
Tony’s Reading List, https://tonysreadinglist.wordpress.com/ (February 9, 2016), “August, October by Andrés Barba / The Same City by Luisgé Martín (Review).”
Words without Borders, https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/ (February 1, 2018), Jeff Tompkins, review of The Right Intention.
Andrés Barba
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Andrés Barba (born 1975 in Madrid) is a Spanish writer. He first gained renown with his novel La hermana de Katia (2001) which was nominated for the Premio Herralde and turned into a movie by Mijke de Jong. His novel Las manos pequeñas appeared in English as Such Small Hands (Transit Books, 2017), translated by Lisa Dillman, where it was heralded by such authors as Edmund White.[1] Other major works include Versiones de Teresa (2006) which won the Premio Torrente Ballester and Muerte de un caballo (2010), winner of the Premio Juan March. In 2017 he won the Premio Herralde for República luminosa.
Barba was included by Granta magazine in their Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists list, published in 2010. His work has been translated into several European languages.[2] Barba himself translated numerous English and American classics into Spanish. He taught at Bowdoin College and Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
Bibliography
El hueso que más duele [The bone that hurts most], 1998
La hermana de Katia [Katia's sister], 2001
Ahora tocad música de baile [Now play a dance tune], 2004
Versiones de Teresa [Teresa's versions], 2006
Libro de las caídas [Book of falls], 2006
Muerte de un caballo [A horse's death], 2011
Lista de desaparecidos [Missing people's list], 2013
En presencia de un payaso [In the company of a clown], 2014
República luminosa [Bright republic], 2017
Translated into English
Rain Over Madrid, translated by Lisa Dillman, Madrid: Hispabooks, 2014 [original title: Ha dejado de llover (2012)]
August, October, translated by Lisa Dillman, Madrid: Hispabooks, 2015 [original title: Agosto, Octubre (2010)]
Such Small Hands, translated by Lisa Dillman, Oakland: Transit Books, 2017 [original title: Las manos pequeñas (2008)] ISBN 9781945492006[3]
The Right Intention, translated by Lisa Dillman, Oakland: Transit Books, 2018 [original title: La recta intención (2002)] ISBN 9781945492068[4]
Andrés Barba Muñiz (Madrid, 1975) is a Spanish novelist, essayist, translator, scriptwriter and photographer. He is the author of a total of twelve books of literary fiction, non-fiction, photography, arts and children’s literature. Among other prizes he has been awarded the Premio Torrente Ballester de Narrativa (for "Versiones de Teresa"), the Premio Anagrama de Ensayo (for "La ceremonia del porno") and the Premio Juan March de Narrativa (for "Muerte de un caballo"). He was also shortlisted in the XIX Premio Herralde de Novela (for "La hermana de Katia", made into a film a few years after by Mijke de Jong). In 2010 he was featured in Granta’s magazine as one of the twenty-two best young Spanish-language writers. His works have been translated into ten languages.
ANDRÉS BARBA ON SUCH SMALL HANDS
Andrés Barba & Josie Mitchell
Granta’s Josie Mitchell talked to Andrés Barba about his new book, Such Small Hands, Gothic and Greek Literature, and how he approaches writing from a child’s perspective.
Josie Mitchell:
Such Small Hands tells the story of Marina, a young girl who moves to an orphanage having lost her parents in a car crash. Her arrival creates a strange tension among the other girls, and the behaviour of the children becomes increasingly dark and ominous. Children and their perspectives often feature in horror stories – is there something inherently scary about their way of seeing the world?
Andrés Barba:
If, for an instant, you let go of that image of the innocent and happy child, you immediately discover that on many occasions throughout history the child has also played an ominous cultural role. The child has been the ‘divine animal’, whose essential animal qualities are to be tamed and civilised. But the child has also been the pure and uncorrupted human being, in certain respects greater than the adult and in other respects lesser than the adult. Traditionally the adult has always wanted the child to become an adult as quickly as possible, because deep down the adult is frightened by the child’s gaze. Adult secrets are revealed by the child’s gaze, and even St Augustine thanked God that children do not have the capacity to execute the violence that they can harbour in their souls. During the Enlightenment the child was seen as the ‘noble savage’. I think that this myth reveals the struggle during that period in history to break free from what were felt as instinctive and uncontrollable forces. It is possible that the period in history with the most idiotic vision of childhood is our own: we demand that the child be the most pure and the most innocent being possible to prevent ourselves from recognising the child’s true complexity.
Mitchell:
The events of your book are based on a true story – a chilling incident that took place in Brazil during the 1960s, in which girls at an orphanage killed another child and played with her body parts for a week. How did you find out about this event, and what drew you to dramatize it?
Barba:
I found it accidentally in a tale–chronicle by Clarice Lispector called ‘The Smallest Woman in the World’, in which some girls in an orphanage of Rio de Janeiro kill another girl and play with her body for various days as if it were a doll. This episode struck me as incredibly powerful, not because it is particularly sinister but because it seems to hide in its interior a story of love and fascination.
Mitchell:
The book is divided into two perspectives. Sometimes we hear from Marina, at other times, the story is told collectively by other the girls at the orphanage. What drew you to the collective ‘we’ voice?
Barba:
I had a tough time finding the appropriate perspective to tell the tale. What finally changed it for me was recognising that what I was writing was nothing more nor less than a Greek tragedy and that what was therefore needed was . . . a chorus! That discovery gave me a way to give the girls a voice that was both conscious and childlike. It was a literary device that allowed me to be inside and outside the girls.
Mitchell:
Such Small Hands shows a deep awareness of the genre conventions of gothic literature. What is it like to write in the gothic tradition?
Barba:
I was more conscious of the Greek than the gothic tradition, but it is true that for many reasons the book can be considered gothic. In Spain there is little of the gothic tradition in literature – I can only think of some pieces by José Cadalso – but there is a strong tradition in visual art, with Goya as the epitome. And now when I think of my book I realise that unconsciously I was working with images reminiscent of those witches sabbaths painted by Goya. What really fascinate me – to the point of obsession – are the ghost stories of Henry James, which are always written with a strikingly realist style.
Mitchell:
Are there any writers in particular that you are in conversation with or who have influenced your writing?
Barba:
Many authors have influenced me over my life. In the particular case of Such Small Hands women writers have been the biggest influence. For a while now I have been searching for a more lyrical voice, and I have been guided by Clarice Lispector, Marina Tsvetaeva, Mary Flannery O’Connor, Natalia Ginzburg, and Dinesen (the pen-name of the Danish author Karen Christenze von Blixen-Finecke). My novel is thus very feminine in all senses, even in its tone.
Mitchell:
Do you think there is a relationship between gothic film, literature, art and real life?
Barba:
The true gothic tradition is capable of making the reader put aside her perception and expectation of real life and enter into a zone of suspense that is quite different. In this sense I am thinking of Charles Maturin, for example, and Edgar Allen Poe and Matthew Lewis. Yet I prefer the gothic that was crafted by Henry James, who continued to use a realist tone and who spoke of ghosts as if he were speaking of tables or pencils. The gothic is anchored in real life because the tensions produced are anchored in the everyday fears of the readers.
Mitchell:
Ann Radcliffe, in her nineteenth century essay ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’, wrote that ‘terror and horror are so far opposite that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them’. Do you recognise this distinction, and how do you employ these emotions in your own work?
Barba:
It is an interesting idea, although it seems to me essentially academic. It is certainly true that there exists that gut fear – that’s to say fear felt in the stomach – and perhaps there is also genital fear, lung fear and heart fear. They are all different types of fear, and from an intellectual point of view it might be interesting to analyse them. However, when I am writing fiction I do not get too bothered by this sort of classification; instead I try to focus on the impulse that is driving me, and to consider the requirements of each moment and to envisage the natural pathways as they branch forward from the moment.
Mitchell:
Many have praised your uncanny ability to conceptualise the world as young children might see and describe it. I’m reminded of Marina’s description of the other children at night – ‘All together, they looked like a team of sleepy little horses’ (‘Todas juntas parecían una recua de caballos pequeños y adormilados’). Meanwhile they all get ‘tiny little folds, miniscule creases by their mouths, invisible gills that made them seem like sea creatures that only came out at night’ (‘unos pliegues minúsculos, pequeñísimos, junto a las bocas, como unas agallas casi invisibles, y entonces parecían criaturas submarinas que sólo emergían durante la noche’). How do you enter the head of a child and capture the way they see the world?
Barba:
Well it is relatively simple to enter the head of a child because we all have a very vivid memory of the thoughts we had when we were children. It is a Platonic exercise: it’s not so much that you have to learn something unknown, rather that you have to try to recall what you knew in the past, to recover the memory with all its complexity, without embellishing it, and with all the details associated with that particular moment. Then you work with that material.
Mitchell:
In the grand tradition of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, the book is at once a ghost story and an exploration of psychological trauma – how did you develop the tension between these two approaches?
Barba:
Well I’m not certain my novel is really a ghost story. It is simply a story, based on reality, and therein lies much of its potential. It is true that in some respects it is a wound that contains its own cure, but basically I am happy to see it as a love story. A story of love and fascination for others, for others who are literally in a polar opposite situation.
Mitchell:
‘And when the doll was so disfigured that she no longer looked like a human baby, only then did the girl begin to play with her,’ reads your epigraph, a line taken from A Woman in Berlin by an anonymous author. Tell me about this quote. Why does it introduce your book?
Barba:
It is the tale of a young girl during the Russian occupation of Berlin after the War. What I found very beautiful was that absolute destruction could generate a new category of humanity. Normally one thinks of horror as the total obliteration of what it means to be human, but many people who live through extremely traumatic experiences recognise that other dimension in the human spirit. When it seems that there is no hope left, true humanity appears in the least expected place – in this case in the most monstrous.
Mitchell:
Such Small Hands was originally published in Spanish just under a decade ago, and is only now being released for an English-language audience. How does it feel to return to this book after so long?
It is lovely and it is emotional. It is like seeing an old friend after many years.
Mitchell:
And finally, it’s a wonderful thing that this excellent book is now available to English-speaking audiences. What other Spanish-language authors do you think we should set about translating?
Barba:
There are many writers in Spanish yet to be discovered of my generation and of other generations. Here in Spain I am fascinated by the works of Mercedes Cebrián and Carlos Pardo, and in Argentina, Mariana Enriquez and Hernán Ronsino.
In Conversation
6th November 2017
6 minute read
Twenty Questions with Andrés Barba
Writers and thinkers take on twenty questions from the TLS, revealing the books they most admire, nagging regrets and the occasional hidden talent
Is there any book, written by someone else, that you wish you’d written?
Yes, many times! I’ve often felt envious of other writers’ talents. It’s happened to me with Clarice Lispector, Marina Tsvetaeva, Henry James, Natalia Ginzburg, Walt Whitman, Musil, Mann, De Quincey, etc. The first book that comes to mind is Spoon River Anthololgy by Edgar Lee Masters.
What will your field look like twenty-five years from now?
I hope that there will be at least one Mohican left!
Which of your contemporaries will be read 100 years from now?
I would hope Alice Munro, Coetzee, César Aira, Kincaid, Ana Blandiana, Peter Nadas, Piglia . . .
What author or book do you think is most underrated? And why?
I think that Anglo-Saxon culture often tends to underestimate literature written in Spanish. There are many authors of very high calibre who do not have even one work translated into English. I’m not talking only about Spanish either. For example it is interesting to see how little an author like Modiano was translated into English before the Nobel Prize.
What author or book do you think is most overrated? And why?
I would happily burn the entire work of Benito Pérez Galdós if anyone were to give it to me. I’m serious. It’s an open offer.
If you could be a writer in any time and place, when and where would it be?
I would have loved to take opium with Thomas De Quincey!
If you could make a change to anything you’ve written over the years, what would it be?
I would remove half the adjectives from my first books!
Which is your least favourite fictional character?
K, in Kafka’s The Castle. The novel fascinates me, but I feel a terrible urge to punch the protagonist on the nose.
Let’s play Humiliation (see David Lodge’s Changing Places): What’s the most famous book you haven’t read?/play you haven’t seen?/album you haven’t listened to?/film you haven’t watched?
Twice I’ve unsuccessfully tried to read War and Peace, but have resolved that it is ultimately impossible. I have neither read nor seen The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. I have never heard the famous quartet of Mahler. I have never seen a film of Abbas Kiarostami. I am not ashamed of any of these.
Do you have any hidden talents?
Yes, but they are well hidden!
Quick questions:
George or T. S.? T. S.
Modernism or post-? Pre!
Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë? Brönte!
Camus or Sartre? Sartre!
Proust or Joyce? Proust!
Knausgaard or Ferrante? Neither!
Jacques Derrida or Judith Butler? Žižek!
Hamlet or A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Both!
Bram Stoker or Mary Shelley? Bram Stoker!
Tracey Emin or Jeff Koons? Miquel Barceló!
Andrés Barba’s latest novel, Such Small Hands, is out now, published by Portobello.
Barba, Andres: THE RIGHT INTENTION
Kirkus Reviews. (Mar. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Barba, Andres THE RIGHT INTENTION Transit Books (Adult Fiction) $15.95 3, 6 ISBN: 978-1-945492-06-8
Lonely, desperate, obsessive characters inform the stories in Barba's latest collection.
Barba (Such Small Hands, 2017, etc.), an acclaimed Spanish writer, is a master of the novella. Shorter than a novel, longer than a story, the novella is an underused form in American fiction. That's unfortunate because, done right, it's as exacting and harrowing as anything else you'll come across. Needless to say, Barba does it right. His most recent book to appear in English contains four novellas. The characters they describe are destructive, lonely, obsessive. In one, a teenage girl, desperate to disappear, becomes anorexic; in another, a newly married man gives himself over to training for a marathon to the exclusion of everything else. They're each consumed by the need to gain control over their own bodies. In Nocturne, which opens the book, a 56-year-old man takes up with a 21-year-old boy but can't escape the fear that the boy will leave him. Like the marathoner and the anorexic girl, what he yearns for is a way to control his own desire, to overcome it entirely. Descent, which closes out the book, describes a trio of grown siblings and their tyrannical mother, who has fallen down and broken her hip. But as with the other stories, a plot synopsis doesn't do Barba justice. These plots are deceptively simple. What's not simple are the characters themselves, the ways that they struggle, and yearn, and fall down. Barba's not eager to help them back up. There are no happy endings here, no false resolutions. Instead, we get the uneasy, unsettling mysteries we get in our everyday lives.
A gorgeous, fully realized collection in which each novella can be appreciated on its own as well as in concert with the others.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Barba, Andres: THE RIGHT INTENTION." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528959992/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7e35f462. Accessed 9 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A528959992
Such Small Hands
New Statesman. 146.5383 (Sept. 8, 2017): p41.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
Such Small Hands
Andres Barba
In this novel, Andres Barba submerges the reader in a terrifying but irresistible reality. Such Small Hands describes a deepening trauma and undermines the idea of childhood innocence with sharp, unsettling violence. After the arrival of a mysterious newcomer called Marina, the girls at an orphanage react with both hatred and desire.
Barba shows that the child's mind is a bottomless well, though it only ever skirts around the edges of understanding. This is a chilling account of what can happen in the secret spaces of a young child's imagination.
Portobello Books, 112pp, 9.99 [pounds sterling]
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Such Small Hands." New Statesman, 8 Sept. 2017, p. 41. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509162746/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6a85e18b. Accessed 9 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A509162746
Such Small Hands
Publishers Weekly. 264.7 (Feb. 13, 2017): p44.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Such Small Hands
Andres Barba, trans. from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman. Transit (Consortium, dist.), $15.95
trade paper (108p) ISBN 978-1-945492-00-6
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.)
Caption: Andres Barba's haunting Such Small Hands is set in a mysterious orphanage (reviewed on this page).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Such Small Hands." Publishers Weekly, 13 Feb. 2017, p. 44. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A482198133/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ba03dca9. Accessed 9 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A482198133
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Such Small Hands by Andrés Barba — child’s play
A girl attempts to come to terms with a scarring trauma in a story of lost innocence
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Lucy Scholes AUGUST 11, 2017 0
Such Small Hands is a magnificently chilling antidote to society’s reverence for ideas of infantile innocence and purity. Instead, Andrés Barba — one of Granta’s Best of Young Spanish Novelists — drags his readers into a hyper-real world of childhood, where children are the objects of horror and their games, rules and rituals the stuff of nightmares.
Seven-year-old Marina is badly injured in a car crash that kills her parents. “My father died instantly and then my mother died in the hospital” is the refrain she internalises and repeats.
“You could touch those words, rest your hand on each sinuous curve: expectant, incomprehensible words,” the narrator explains, using fractured, sensory-specific fragments to describe Marina’s experience: a silence that’s “solidified” like a “positive form”; the white of her exposed ribs gleaming through her “gaping flesh, sliced so cleanly that the skin fell away like a curtain”; the “metallic taste in her throat”; a desperate thirst.
It’s not that language isn’t adequate — indeed, Lisa Dillman’s translation is as evocative as a reader could wish for, the “muffled, maritime sound of the road” right before the crash, the moment of impact described as that in which the car “jumped the meridian” — Marina is simply too young and too traumatised to be able to articulate the experience fully herself.
Once she has recovered, she’s taken to an orphanage, but Marina isn’t like the other girls there. She’s different. As they take their morning showers together, the sight of the new girl’s scarred torso precipitates the collapse of the other girls’ collective identity: “Suddenly we saw each other seeing it, we differentiated each other among things, among the others, we differentiated her, her back, her walk, her eyes, her face like a vague feeling of fear.”
This ominous Greek chorus begins with the low promise of danger — “One afternoon the adult said, ‘There’s a new girl coming. Don’t be scared.’ But we weren’t then. At first we weren’t scared” — but builds into a febrile, nausea-inducing hysteria: “Desire was a big knife and we were the handle.”
After the accident, the psychologist treating Marina gives her a doll, but the girls at the orphanage tear the toy’s limbs from its body and bury them in the playground. Soon after, Marina invents a creepy night-time game for everyone to play — stripped bare and redressed, with their faces made up, the girls take it in turns to pretend to be the doll: “The differences between them diminished: from now on they were doll necks, doll hands, doll eyes and lips.”
Like Jean Cocteau’s terrible “Game”, the bizarre version of life and death played by the teenage siblings in his novella Les Enfants Terribles, Barba’s grasp of the vertiginous balance between the real and the imaginary in the girls’ play is absolute. But whereas Cocteau’s protagonists indulge in a fantasy of childhood that keeps adult life at bay, Barba’s still undeveloped little girls have a far shakier grasp on reality. Hatred and love, rage and desire, the violent and the erotic — everything becomes entangled. As “gentleness” gives way to “incomprehensible hostility”, and the girls transform from a “team of sleepy little horses” into a pack of “dozing predators”, the path is set towards a shocking and bloody denouement worthy of the most spine-tingling horror film.
Such Small Hands, by Andrés Barba, translated by Lisa Dillman, Portobello, RRP£9.99, 112 pages
Such Small Hands by Andrés Barba review – a chilling ghost story
An unsettling tale set in an orphanage will trouble readers long after they have put the novella aside
Sarah Perry
Sat 26 Aug 2017 07.30 BST Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 12.43 GMT
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Andrés Barba … uncanny exactitude.
Andrés Barba … uncanny exactitude. Photograph: Eduardo Cabrera
Marina, the seven-year-old girl around whom Andrés Barba’s chilling Spanish novella unfolds, has been wounded in an accident that killed her parents, her skin flensed from her ribs “like a curtain”. She is taken to live in an orphanage – “a very pretty place”, promises her psychologist, “with other girls”. She does not, however, go alone. She takes with her a wide-eyed doll, also called Marina, which is her constant companion: “The only one who didn’t lie. The only one calm, as if halfway through a long life.”
Both child-Marina and doll-Marina become the focus of the other girls’ attention in a manner that is part cruel, part adoring and part uneasily erotic. In time their affectionate but uneasy playfulness becomes a secret night-time game, of a kind of lascivious malice that may well trouble the reader long after the book has been set aside (“Desire was a big knife and we were the handle …”). The adults of the orphanage remain peripheral, unable or unwilling to put a restraining hand on the children: the presence most strongly felt is not that of the principal but of a statue of Saint Anne, whose welcoming arms are “black and inescapable”.
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Barba inhabits the minds of children with an exactitude that seems to me so uncanny as to be almost sinister – as when the girls, while washing, see Marina’s scar. The effect is of having taken a bite of Eden’s forbidden fruit: all at once they become aware of themselves as mortal, and just as likely as Marina to be wounded. But the book is by no means without relief, nor is this a cynical exploitation of an atavistic fear of the child: the passages in which the other girls narrate their regard for Marina, in a first person plural voice, have an affecting tenderness. “Were we forgiving her? Was that what love was?”
It is Marina’s scar, and what it signifies, that eventually unpins the girls from the ordinary playtimes of children. Leslie Jamison, in her essay “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain”, writes of wounded women: “Violence turns them celestial … we can’t look away. We can’t stop imagining new ways for them to hurt.” This might have been the epigraph for the book: Marina is beatified by suffering, but the mere fact of her pain, stitched in scar tissue over her ribcage, is an enticement to more.
The girls' affectionate but uneasy playfulness becomes a secret night-time game, of a kind of lascivious malice
This is as effective a ghost story as any I have read, but lying behind the shocks is a meditation on language and its power to bind or loosen thought and behaviour. Since Marina and the girls cannot verbalise the intense confusion of their feelings, they resort to expressing them by altogether more direct means. Only when they are plainly told what they have done do they begin to think they have transgressed: “They put a name on everything. They said, ‘Look what you did.’ The names scared us. How is it that a thing gets caught inside a name and never comes out again?”
Barba’s use of genre conventions is both affectionate and knowing. All the ghost-story aficionado could ask of an evening’s reading by the fire is here: a child’s toy animated by longing and distress, and possibly by something more; an orphanage whose “classroom, dining room, bathrooms, closets [and] red-haired clown at the door with a chalkboard in his stomach” seem loaded with a malicious potential energy; the disrupting arrival of a stranger. But he also interrogates the genre, querying the limits of what it means to be haunted and haunting, and of what most affects the reader. The lingering impression is not, necessarily, that we might wake in the night, wondering if an object has moved towards us of its own accord; but that the world contains other and nearer evils that cannot be exorcised or placated.
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As is ever the case when reading in translation, I wondered how closely Lisa Dillman’s prose mimicked Barba’s lexis and cadence in Spanish. From the first it is faintly odd, sometimes affectless, the phrasing occasionally slightly awry; but this is so wholly in keeping with the book’s uncanny effects and plays so significant a role in its accumulation of cool terror that I can only assume it is a superbly skilful translation playing close attention to Barba’s original.
An afterword from Edmund White refers to Barba’s source material: an episode in a Brazilian orphanage reported in the 60s. Generally I have a ghoulish look at distressing news reports; here I refrained. I was partly unwilling to fracture Barba’s fragile construction of tenderness and terror, partly too thoroughly unnerved.
The novel’s title recalls the final line of EE Cummings’s poem, “Somewhere I Have Never Travelled” (“nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands”), and I found myself returning to its verses as I pondered the full effects and meaning of the book. It is, yes, about language, wounding, wickedness: but it is also about how fleeting and how vulnerable is the state of childhood innocence – that “nothing which we are to perceive in this world/equals the power of [its] intense fragility”.
• Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent is published by Serpent’s Tail.
• Such Small Hands is published by Portobello. To order a copy for £8.49 (RRP £9.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
March 6, 2018
The Right Intention – Andrés Barba
by Emma Ramadan
Andrés Barba The Right Intention[Transit Books; 2018]
Tr. by Lisa Dillman
Andrés Barba blew onto the American literary scene last year when Lisa Dillman’s translation of Las manos pequeñas (Such Small Hands) was published last April by Transit Books, a new press dedicated exclusively to translations. A slim book from a foreign author published by a small press could easily have come and gone without much notice, but Such Small Hands became something of a sensation in the translation world, scoring reviews in big publications and the devotion of independent bookstores around the country.
Such Small Hands, originally published in Spanish in 2008, is eerie and all-consuming. The book was inspired by a few lines from Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s story “The Smallest Woman in the World” that describe an incident in a Brazilian orphanage in the 1960s in which some girls took the life of a fellow orphan and hid her body for a week, punishing and playing with it. Barba explodes this purportedly true story into a full-blown examination of the inner psyches of orphanage girls, starting with the arrival of seven year-old Marina who is subsequently bullied and adored. The plot of Such Small Hands is fantastically creepy, mysterious, and enticing, but what is perhaps most exciting about the book is not the haunting games of orphanage girls; it’s how convincingly Barba portrays them.
His ability to inhabit the mind and language of his characters is a skill equally present in his second book to be published in the US, The Right Intention. In this collection of stories, Barba crafts four separate worlds using very little description, matched by Lisa Dillman in a hugely satisfying translation. His writing is populated mostly by the inner thoughts of his characters, and from there the reader can imagine and construct all the scenery, the full backdrop to their reading experience. Whereas Such Small Hands was almost otherworldly, each of the stories in The Right Intention feels utterly real. What Barba seems particularly interested in showing his readers is that moment of tension when the character knows they’ve gone too far. They’re already hurtling towards their own demise, or someone else’s. Their mind was most likely made up before the story even started. Marina of Such Small Hands comes up with an idea for a sinister game that results in her own catastrophic end. In each of the stories in The Right Intention, Barba shows us four people on their own road to ruin.
In “Nocturne,” Barba illustrates a love story that never has a chance to succeed because of one man’s crippling self-doubt. The story opens with a the narrator obsessing over whether or not to contact the author of a cryptic personal ad: I’m so alone. Roberto. (91) 4177681. After days of gnawing curiosity and desire, he finally submits and contacts Roberto. What follows seems to be a love story in the process of unfolding, but there are clues that the narrator will wreck everything, whether he plans to or not. Barba is interested in revealing the subtle ways in which people so easily take happiness and distort it into something ugly, the way people allow things that once inspired love to embody vitriol. Roberto’s age, at first enticing, becomes a source of pain as the narrator becomes “aware of the fact that there was a huge part of the twenty-one-year-old boy’s life that he would never be a part of . . . He was young, insultingly young, and always would be.” The narrator, incapable of letting himself go in the relationship, turns his fear of being rejected for his older age into something he despises in his young lover, and morphs his fear into cruelty, treating the boy (as he takes to thinking of him) with utter contempt, forcing an endgame. In under 60 pages, Barba takes us through the full gamut of emotions of someone who finds himself the object of a love that seems too good to be true, and who can’t help but accelerate it into oblivion.
In the middle stories of the collection, Barba tackles the impulse to destroy oneself from the inside out, using physical pain to erase emotional trauma. The characters of these stories drive themselves to physical and mental ruin to escape emotional pain. Barba illustrates how what looks like complete control can easily disintegrate, leaving utter chaos. Reminiscent of Such Small Hands, the tenuous connections between characters are rendered with aching clarity. Barba often traces a clear line, studying his characters’ mental and physical degradation as a result of the very thing to which they have turned as a means of emotional escape.
The final story, “Descent,” zooms in on a woman whose mother is sick in the hospital. We are thrown into the midst of her family drama when old pains resurface as the matriarch inches towards death. Whereas in the first three stories Barba’s characters seem intent from the start to tunnel into their own demises, in “Descent,” Barba presents his character with clear opportunities to choose between allowing her mother some final moments of joy, or enacting secret vengeance. In what is perhaps the least interesting exciting story of the collection, Barba and his translator nevertheless demonstrate a masterful ability to capture the atmosphere of the moment. The characters think thoughts that at first seem cruel, but quickly register as familiar, relatable. For example, as the woman reflects on her relationship with her mother, she compares her family to her husband’s: “When she first met Manuel’s family, she got the feeling that their relationships were completely unreal . . . Discovering later that their affection was genuine turned her against Mamá in a subtle way, because in the same sense that Manuel’s mother had been solely responsible for the love in his family, Mamá must have been to blame for the distance and envy in hers.” This resentment towards her mother culminates in the decision to inflict on her “the ultimate punishment.” Through a mundane story of relatively typical family drama, Barba reveals the surprising levels of cruelty we might be capable of reaching when a lifetime of anger, shame, and sadness morph into something else entirely.
Whether he’s writing about teenage girls in an anorexia treatment center or a man literally running away from his marriage, whether the story is creepy and enthralling or bordering on dull, Barba’s undeniable skill lies in crafting convincing characters that feel like friends, or like enemies, or like people you hope never to meet, whose downfalls feel dangerously possible. Edmund White said that with Such Small Hands, “Barba has returned us to the nightmare of childhood.” Perhaps with The Right Intention, Barba has revealed to us the nightmare of existence.
Emma Ramadan is a literary translator based in Providence, RI, where she is the co-owner of Riffraff, a bookstore and bar. Her translations include Anne Garréta’s Sphinx and Not One Day (Deep Vellum), Anne Parian’s Monospace (La Presse), and Fouad Laroui’s The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers. Her forthcoming translations include Ahmed Bouanani’s The Shutters (New Directions), Brice Matthieussent’s Revenge of the Translator (Deep Vellum), and Virginie Despentes’s Pretty Things (Feminist Press), among others.
February 2018 issue
Well-Meaning Plans Give Way to Destructive Obsessions in Andrés Barba’s “The Right Intention”
Reviewed by Jeff Tompkins
Image of Well-Meaning Plans Give Way to Destructive Obsessions in Andrés Barba’s “The Right Intention”
Translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman
Transit Books, 2018
“If only he could put into words what he feels it would be almost like thinking clearly, but he cannot think clearly.”
This is the distress signal sent up at a crucial juncture by the protagonist of “Marathon,” the third of the four novellas in Andrés Barba’s The Right Intention, a collection originally published in the author’s native Spain as La recta intención in 2002. With its intimations of an inability to communicate, paranoia, and worse (note that “almost”), it’s a moment of realization that could define any of the main characters in these stories—all of them well-off urbanites who succumb to a single, overwhelming obsession. The destructive consequences of those obsessions, traced with an almost clinical precision, are the substance of Barba’s absorbing, unnerving stories.
In “Nocturne,” a single, comfortably settled gay man in late middle age finds his life of routine upended by an infatuation with a much younger man he meets through a personal ad. The lover has no illusions about the life of quiet desperation he’s been leading, the disappointment he’s kept at bay: “It seemed impossible to him that he had held on this way for so many years.” The same objectivity manifests itself later, once the affair reaches the abrupt end he has done so much to bring about, when he declares to the younger man, all too plausibly, “now it’s going to take me five years to get over you.”
Barba raises the stakes, and heightens the emotional pitch, with “Debilitation,” an account of a teenage girl’s descent into anorexia. Her dysfunction starts with an unwelcome poolside kiss—“Luis’s ridiculous, almost unpleasant tongue like a soggy worm wriggling against hers”—and proceeds into a gruesome body horror of cutting and self-starvation before she winds up in an expensive private clinic. Inside, her steely will has to contend with not only a strict, eat-your-peas kind of authority but a witchy fellow patient and an unlikely love interest. Closure, recovery are still somewhere over the horizon when “Debilitation” reaches its close, but at its moving climax her pain unspools in a three-page sentence that is a tour de force for the translator, Lisa Dillman, as well as the author. (Here as in the other stories, Dillman’s skillfull rendering of Barba’s free indirect style, along with a number of casually deployed colloquialisms —“frumpier,” “meds,” terse teen-speak like “Are you into me?” and “It’s pretty messed up”— results in a text that stands on its own in English as a stylistic feat.)
From this ordeal it is a relative step down in intensity to “Marathon,” which might be described as a study in the obnoxiousness of the long-distance runner. Training for an upcoming road race with increasing single-mindedness, Barba’s marathon man is willing to jeopardize both his marriage and a nascent friendship with a fellow runner, conceivably the one person in his life who might be able to understand his fixation. As maddening as the athlete’s behavior is, Barba makes sure we tunnel into his perspective: “If anyone had asked if he was happy he wouldn’t have known how to respond. Perhaps by saying that he felt empty, and that emptiness was, if not happiness, then the closest thing to a state of calm he’d ever known, a calm that didn’t need to be spoken or shared.”
In the final story, “Descent,” a grown, married woman with children has to contend with a sudden injury to, and the subsequent decline of, her elderly mother. The ordeal is made even more trying by the fact that the dying woman is a horror, a tyrant whose neediness and emotional manipulations have turned her three grown children into basket cases. You might think this means the most extreme story has been saved for last, but there’s a subtle change-up in Barba’s approach here, a pulling-back from his previously tight focus, that makes “Descent” the most human and accessible of the four novellas. The material has room to breathe; not just because this family’s backstory is effectively sketched in over a few pages (and because the main character is given a supportive husband, free of her family’s pathologies) but because there’s a sense of contingency, an arbitrariness in the way events unfold around us, that eludes any fine-meshed authorial net. In the climactic deathbed scene, especially, absurdity tugs at mortality’s hem in a way that resonates with one’s own experience of this terminal moment. The young priest who arrives to administer the last rites is both awkward and incongruously handsome—and then: “Life, made more ridiculous by the presence of the hospital window, is the sound of a bus horn.” More than any of the other novellas in The Right Intention, this story made me curious to see what Barba can do in a novel.
As it happens, last year Transit Books brought out a 2008 Barba novel, the well-received Such Small Hands, also in a translation by Lisa Dillman, and he has written twelve books of fiction and nonfiction overall. He has also translated a pair of stylistically extravagant nineteenth-century literary renegades, Herman Melville and Thomas De Quincey, into Spanish. All of which furthers the impression one gets from The Right Intention that an American readership for this talented writer is overdue.
But if one can lament how long it took for The Right Intention to receive its passport into English, there’s a certain piquancy in the way these stories, encountered in 2018, evoke an irrecoverable moment that isn’t even twenty years in the past. Meaning, the short span of our millennium just prior to the arrival of cell phones, texting, social media, and all their attendant compulsions. (In a sequence that seems like a kind of historical fiction, the lover in “Nocturne” races from newsstand to newsstand to track down a copy of the magazine with the right personal ad in it.) Which isn’t to suggest that this quartet of novellas allows the reader to indulge in any easy nostalgia. Sentient people—the kind of people who read fiction in translation, for instance—like to chide themselves for the way the devices in their hands are rewiring their circuitry, messing with their heads. Barba’s stories are a bracing reminder that we were finding plenty of ways to torment ourselves long before the latest technologies made it so much easier for us.