“Don’t upset her,” Agata warns, not wanting to have her maternal skills put to the test. She is not upset. She’s laughing!” Vaclav says, taking off his tool belt and dangling it over the crib. Pavla makes her sound again and watches as her father’s astonishment turns to pleasure, his smile unmasking a mouthful of brown and rotted teeth that emerge from his swollen gums at odd angles like the worn picket fence that surrounds Agata’s garden and fails to keep out the scavenger deer. Pavla will do anything to keep seeing these teeth and so she laughs and waves her arms and feels, for the first time in her life, but not the last, the exquisite pain of love.”

Marisa Silver’s ‘Little Nothing’ feels like a balm you put on your wounds. A balm that burns as it heals you. It flows like syrup through your eyes and into your mind sipping into your subconsciousness. From the first sentences, the rough poeticism of the story captivates you and doesn’t let go until you are over and through.

The story is about a girl, a woman, a mother; it’s about a boy, a man and a father, about love that can’t be put down into words, and the terrible pain of existence. Perhaps the first lines should have prepared you for what’s to come, but they don’t. When trouble comes, it hits. 

And you are left wondering ‘When? When is it going to be okay?’.

The deeper you go into the depth of the pages, the more desperate you become. And yet, you can feel the light ahead. It’s gloomy, tinted, but is light nonetheless, and sometimes it shows its rays of hope that everything will be good again, that there is an escape from the terror.

‘Little Nothing’ is a fairytale. A fairytale for people who have tasted some bitterness of life and are searching for somebody to tell them ‘it’s okay’. The pain is okay. It is okay to feel hurt, to feel angry, to feel sad, to not be happy. It subtly hints, there is more to life than a pursuit of joy, than the pursuit of safety. There is power in you that is beyond your understanding. It instructs - pain is fleeting and transformative. Whatever comes - you can face it. It is okay.

The tale touches many wounds - parental ambiguity and their ultimate disapproval, cruelty of children, lack of empathy from those who are meant to help, awfulness of war, selfishness, grid, cowardice, hopelessness, judgment, unfairness - all the things we don’t like to bring up. And we don’t have to. We can read in silence and feel the hurt. We can let it go. We can submit to what life is - an unpredictable journey that will test everything there is in you. We can let the bitter smile on our faces turn upward and put down the cynical mask. We can be weak and fragile for a moment in complete safety in between the paper pages, to later emerge into our realities - recovered, renewed, revitalised.

Have a good reading.

C. Fox

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