title: The Hand (Short Stories)
author:  Guy de Maupassant 
description: Text: English (translation)<br /> Original Language: French
zlib_text: 
  
  
  [Afterword](Contents.xhtml#aft)
  
  
  _Edmund White_
  
  
  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. Kafka did that. Bruno
  Schulz did that. Now the Spanish writer Andrés Barba has done it with the
  terrifying _Such Small Hands_ , which introduces us to the psychosis of
  childhood emotions and midnight rituals. This is a unique book.
  
  
  It is reputedly based on an incident that occurred in Brazil in the 1960s, in
  which the girls at an orphanage took the life of another child and played with
  her body parts for a week. But _Such Small Hands_ is not a grisly _fait
  divers_. Following the lead of Jean Genet, who in _The Maids_ turned a
  newspaper account of two psychopathic servants killing their mistress into a
  strangely hieratic, ritualistic tragedy, Barba has subsumed the _grand
  guignol_ aspects of the bloody anecdote into a poetic meditation on love and
  childhood.
  
  
  To signal that he doesn’t intend for hi