I read this in parallel, the German Ohne Blut on my Kindle, the original Italian Senza Sangue in the flesh/paper as it were (my German is much better than my Italian; I couldn’t have understood the Italian on its own). It’s a short but highly effective novel, with its own odd structure, and often seems like five or so novels edited into one novella. Briefly put, it’s about a massacre after (I presume) the Spanish Civil War, and one survivor’s attempt at vengeance, but don’t read it expecting a crime thriller, anymore than Baricco’s classic Silk is a treatise on the 19th Century silk trade.

There’s a dreamy vagueness of focus in Baricco, which I enjoy; it can focus on two specific individuals in a cafe, talking of violence and hate, and then abruptly switch to a waitress and her dreams, and then back again. I am reminded of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the sense both of atmosphere and specificity, of diaphanous mood & coloration, and sudden hard texture. I wanted to quote the book but my Italian & German are too shit to feel confident of my translations at length; however I enjoyed this exchange after the Civil War, when one character justifies his actions during the war, as leading to a better world; the other character responds: “La guerra l’avete vinta. Questo le sembra un mondo migliore?” – “You won the war. Does this seem a better world to you?”