"Without Blood" by Alessandro Baricco has long been one of my favourite short novels. Now, that I have read the book in original Italian, I can attest that the effect of the story is still as strong. For many this is a book about war victims, for others this is a twisted love story. And the book is both. However, a metalinguistic reading transforms the novel into an analysis of the act of writing. Baricco not only manages to ask fundamental questions about the nature of the artistic word, but in doing so he also manages to develop a new form of literature, namely something I coin as the 'novelistic poem'. I have spoken at length about this novel in this podcast. Please listen: https://archive.org/details/instituteofideas_bookclub_160107 .