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A review by lavinia_reads
Little Nothing by Marisa Silver
5.0
“Think of a flower blooming,” says the midwife to Agata. “A rose opening, the petals pushing out ….out …..”
But childbirth is not as gentle as the opening of a rose, and the baby girl is not the perfect baby, her parents have dreamed. She looks “like a rag doll sewn together from cast-off parts,” cries the mother. The baby girl is a dwarf, a disfigured little thing with a big head and short limps that smells of roses. The mother called her Pavla, which literally means little.
Pavla lives in a small village somewhere in Eastern Europe in the late 1800s, at the turn of the century, perhaps. When her parents let her attend school, the other children call Pavla Little Nothing and they assault her in a deliberately humiliating way. These humiliations prepare her for the struggles that await her in the next years. As she matures, something enticing happens, ‘an unmistakable loveliness reveals itself.’ Her beauty agitates the villagers, makes them wonder if she is really real.
Fearing for their daughter’s future, her parents visit local doctors looking for a treatment to her dwarfism. It is when one of these “doctors” slowly stretches her apart that Pavla’s physical form makes a radical change, the first of several body transformations that seem to be motivated by some existential experience: life and death, meaning and happiness, good and evil.
“How easy is to admire evil, to become entranced by its singularity of purpose and its amoral beauty.”
Little Nothing reaches back into a magical and horrified world of gypsy curses, circus shows, werewolves, war and rural poverty. It a story about love, but it is not a love story, not in the classic sense anyway. It is a love that exists beyond the realm of the physical, it is a love that motivates, it is a way to find out who you are.
Marisa Silver’s writing is raw, intense and vivid. Little Nothing is not an easy book, the impossibility of some of the events may not appeal to everyone. It is a thrilling and wonderful book, an allegorical, complex and ambiguous fairy tale about metamorphosis.
But childbirth is not as gentle as the opening of a rose, and the baby girl is not the perfect baby, her parents have dreamed. She looks “like a rag doll sewn together from cast-off parts,” cries the mother. The baby girl is a dwarf, a disfigured little thing with a big head and short limps that smells of roses. The mother called her Pavla, which literally means little.
Pavla lives in a small village somewhere in Eastern Europe in the late 1800s, at the turn of the century, perhaps. When her parents let her attend school, the other children call Pavla Little Nothing and they assault her in a deliberately humiliating way. These humiliations prepare her for the struggles that await her in the next years. As she matures, something enticing happens, ‘an unmistakable loveliness reveals itself.’ Her beauty agitates the villagers, makes them wonder if she is really real.
Fearing for their daughter’s future, her parents visit local doctors looking for a treatment to her dwarfism. It is when one of these “doctors” slowly stretches her apart that Pavla’s physical form makes a radical change, the first of several body transformations that seem to be motivated by some existential experience: life and death, meaning and happiness, good and evil.
“How easy is to admire evil, to become entranced by its singularity of purpose and its amoral beauty.”
Little Nothing reaches back into a magical and horrified world of gypsy curses, circus shows, werewolves, war and rural poverty. It a story about love, but it is not a love story, not in the classic sense anyway. It is a love that exists beyond the realm of the physical, it is a love that motivates, it is a way to find out who you are.
Marisa Silver’s writing is raw, intense and vivid. Little Nothing is not an easy book, the impossibility of some of the events may not appeal to everyone. It is a thrilling and wonderful book, an allegorical, complex and ambiguous fairy tale about metamorphosis.