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'Without Blood' is unquestionably unsettling. It took me barely an hour to read (it's a skinny 87 pages of widely-spaced prose), so it's definitely a novella rather than a novel, but many of the images resonate long after I'd put the book down.

The story opens with a man hiding Nina, his 4-year-old daughter, under the floorboards before he is murdered - together with his son - by a gang of men. One of the men - actually a 20-year-old boy - discovers the girl's hiding place but eventually decides to keep her presence there a secret.

The story then fast-forwards forty-odd years. Nina tracks down the man who effectively saved her life - now an old man - and invites him for a drink. He is aware that the other men present at the murder have died under mysterious circumstances, and assumes the woman is going to kill him, too, in revenge for her father's and brother's deaths.

Baricco's writing is as sparse as you can imagine - not a word more than necessary - which gives the story its unsettling air. That, and the fact that we are given only glimpses of the lives of these two people - just the bare, necessary details. Minimalist and haunting, there's something of the fairy tale about this story. [September 2006] ( )