Book review: The Small Backs of Children - Woolf-like
How the young end up as metaphors who help us tell our stories rather than fully living their own
So says Menas, the Lithuanian girl at the centre of Lidia Yuknavitch's , a prose poem recast as a novel and calling to mind the late work of Virginia Woolf and Clarice Lispector's short stories, while slyly rewriting Vladimir Nabokov's .
When we first meet Menas, she is watching an ensnared wolf gnawing off its leg to break free - an apt metaphor for Menas' own efforts to overcome a childhood in which she was repeatedly raped by marauding soldiers and saw her family blown to oblivion in an explosion she somehow survived.
"I am like a blast particle - a piece of matter that was not destroyed, a piece of something looking for form," Menas tells us. With the help of a bereft woman whose husband had been shipped to Siberia when Lithuania was a Soviet republic, the form that shapes Menas and her story is art; she becomes a painter and grows toward womanhood.
Or does she?
