Yuknavitch’s novel explores various intersections between the friends and the girl, and the ways each of them grapple with their own lives and find ways to make art with the material at hand. Much of the story is in what happens after that, both to the girl and to the friends of the photographer, each of whom is a practitioner of a creative art and referred to in light of such (the writer, the filmmaker, the poet, the painter, etcetera). Instead, we have only the presence of violence and, on this day, an American photographer who captures the moment the blast destroys the girl’s family, a photograph which goes on to win a Pulitzer Prize. Here we wait for America to burst onto the scene with her rescue efforts, her loud guns and tanks sounding rescue, waving her tri-colored flag. The tremor of a hand or the twitch of an eye, bullet marks in the side of a house women with scars around their eyes and mouths as deep as archaeological finds, little boys who could not sit in chairs.Īmerica – that great maker of realities – blind and deaf to all of it.Ī story that never existed, since no one saw it represented. Systemized violence became part of ordinary experience, so that it was not unusual to see – not blood and body parts, but displaced fear and horror in micromotions. Children were bought and sold on the open market. Women and children were raped repeatedly. In the world around them, violences became perpetual. At six, she has endured multiple rapes, has lived in the shadow of violence, has seen her entire family vaporized before her eyes. The story’s first pages introduce us to one of its main characters–the only one ever named in the book (though even then only once, and not until halfway through)–a young girl who has, having grown up in a time of war, lived atrocities. It is lovely and breath-taking and unsettling in many ways.
It succeeds consistently in giving women the stage to tell their own stories, even when those stories are uncomfortable and do not resolve in palatable paragraphs, even when characters eschew our labels like “victim” and “broken” in favor of their own narratives with labels like “hero” and “fierce,” celebrating reclamation in ways that seem crass and almost animal to the reader. It’s fiercely woman-centric, a work that refuses to filter the female body and story through the male gaze. It is one of the most lyrical pieces of prose I’ve read recently, and deeply character-driven. Lidia Yuknavitch’s most recent novel, The Small Backs of Children, is beautiful, poetic, animal, and disturbing.
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