Such Small Hands – A Terrifyingly Subliminal Tale of Trauma and Abandonment

“…We ambled awkwardly alongside Marina’s memory, always parallel, always tired, always hungry, but the urgency of our desire wasn’t enough to bring it to life and then we tired of trying, and desire turned to rage against that girl who seemed too old…

Last year when I read Argentinean author Samantha Schweblin’s novella Fever Dream I was haunted for days by its eerie, foreboding mood & the images and questions it evoked. It’s a surrealistic tale that’s part political & eco critique and part intimate study of broken souls. I am still at a loss of words to describe the feeling this unconventional yet dazzling short novel kindled within me which was exemplarily translated by Megan McDowell. Spanish author Andres Barba’s 2008 novella Such Small Hands also withholds such ferocious intensity, its perplexing tone mesmerizingly translated by Lisa Dillman. Such Small Hands is a journey into the creepy and incredibly complex inner world of orphaned children. Barba dismantles the typical societal notions of childhood innocence and purity to showcase how callousness and grim curiosity are also part of a child’s world, which is firmly rooted inside the traumatized and isolated kids characters of Barba.

Both Fever Dream and Such Small Hands take a genre story and make it a chilling experiment in literary form.  Edmund White in the afterword of Such Small Hands befittingly writes, “Every once in a while a novel does not record reality but creates a whole new reality, one that casts a light on our darkest feelings.” The novella pulls us into its grimly fascinating world through its focus on the minutiae and in the manner Barba inventively discerns the coarser emotions of traumatized children. On the outset, Such Small Hands tells a very simple tale of a seven-year old Marina who ends in an orphanage after suddenly losing her parents in an automobile accident. When Marina enters the orphanage, clutching her only source of comfort – a toy doll – she immediately becomes both an object of intrigue and an outcast.

Divided into three parts, each small chapters alternates between the perspective of Marina and the voice of other girls who all speak as one. Trapped in the claustrophobic world of orphaned children, we the readers become a doll as the children susurrate their darker inner most thoughts that forebode a tragic conclusion. When Marina realizes that she is ‘different’ (from the scar across the midriff to her quiet defiance while carrying out a hunger strike, Marina is doomed to not be a part of the ‘collective’) she seeks to wrest control from her tormentors by teaching them a game. Under Barba’s pristinely arranged prose, the intention and results profoundly unsettles us.

The overall events in Such Small Hands is said to be based on a chilling real-life incident that took place in Brazil in the 1960s. Girls in an orphanage at Rio de Janeiro killed a child and played with her body parts for a week. In the interview to Granta, Barba states that this episode had a powerful impact on him, “not because it is particularly sinister but because it seems to hide in its interior a story of love and fascination.” Consequently, Barba isn’t trying to chronicle the grim tale of killer kids, but deploys the written word to create a powerful mood and accesses the unconscious mind in a way that’s extremely complex and yet flows smoothly.  

Such Small Hands and Fever Dream (and I’m on the hunt for similar novellas) clearly can’t be reduced to its plot points. Its atmospheric creepiness can only be felt; the depiction of unforeseeable cruelties in a mundane reality which sets out to violently infiltrate our subconscious. As I mentioned earlier, Barba’s fascination with minutiae leads to grotesque as well as magical images. For instance, the trail of words used to describe the portentous act of severing the caterpillar which is juxtaposed with Marina talking to her psychologist. It remains as a testament to Barba’s power to transport us to unseen, darker dimensions within the everyday normality (which brings to mind the adjective ‘Lynchian’).

Overall, Such Small Hands is fiction at its most formidable and compelling. It explores beauty, vileness, pandemonium, and the complexities of violence existing at the various levels of seemingly simple world of children.