The Ninth by Ferenc Barnas
A review by Josh Maday
Telling a story from a child's point of view is one of the most difficult modes of fiction to write successfully. The narrator of Ferenc Barnas's The Ninth is a nine-year-old boy -- the ninth child of ten (eleven, counting the brother who died) in a large Hungarian family -- whose inexperience and bare vocabulary are compounded by a speech disability. In writing The Ninth, Barnas seems to have wanted to give himself a taste of what difficulty his narrator must face when trying to give expression to his experience. Overall, Barnas succeeds, using simple language and a conversational style that allows dramatic irony and understatement to do most of the heavy lifting. At the same time he navigates the Scylla and Charybdis of condescension toward the child narrator and the hyper-extended language of that same precocious narrator. The novel's opening lines demonstrate Barnas's felicity: Last night I had a dream, and in it I was brave: three boys were coming toward me as I ...
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