The Small Backs of Children

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Average customer rating 4.7 (11 comments)

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The rare book that I picked up because I liked the title. I'm gonna have to disagree with all the 5-star reviews here. Compared to Henry Miller and Bukowski, among others, Lidia Yukanivitch is certainly among the so-called transgressive writers and the graphic sex plays out like a more literary version of "50 Shades of Grey." I don't mind sex in novels, but it's always a little hard to take seriously for me and, frankly, it didn't really add much to the story. Yuknavitch's style is original, but draws too much attention to itself. Some chapters are only a sentence long, others have double instead of single columns. To what end exactly? The characters, rather than named, are simply girl, filmmaker, poet, etc. The best thing I can say about it is that it's an interesting failure.

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This is the freshest, boldest, most remarkable book I have read this year. You probably don't know people like the characters Yuknavitch has created. However, there is a titillating voyeuristic sense of peering into lives and minds so different from your experience that you can't turn away.Read this book now, then read it again.

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I read it in two days and then I started reading it again because it's that kind of book, one that ought to be chewed on for a while. Maybe it even nudges you to chew on yourself until you free your body from the trap of what we've been told stories are supposed to be. This story is not a formulaic feel good hero story; that's one of the reasons I love it and why you should read it.

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Like her teacher before her, Ken Kesey, his contemporary William Burroughs, and their predecessors Joyce, Faulkner and Kerouac (all men), Lidia Yuknavitch has changed what a narrative fiction can be. How narrative can exist and live in this world as art. She leads both the novel form and Daisy Miller from Henry James' male dominated drawing room and sets her against a world of pain and war and darkness on a white, white canvass where there is no place to hide. Yuknavitch's is a new landscape, a portrait painted with words drawn lovingly and violently from the bodies of women and flung against the mask of what we, as a culture, wish we were and tell ourselves we are. This book has changed me forever and I will imagine painting, film, poem, photography and narrative fiction differently, estimate art with a different soul. The rhythm of the language, the rhythm of the images, and the structure of the interwoven stories build not only a nearly unbearable dramatic tension, but slip like scent into the mind and dwell there. I will dream this work. Yuknavitch has broken my heart and restored my faith. It is a gift.

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Why can't I add more stars? 6/5 is my ranking because this book is off the charts in terms of creative original writing. So many books, so many writers, but the voice of Yuknavitch on the page is distinctive, unmatched for its intense celebration of the human body and its capacity for pain and love. I read it too quickly this first time - in a rush of experiencing the book on its first day. Now I will take the rest of the summer to slowly read it, let is seep in, and try to understand this work of art at a deeper level.

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With the tone of McCarthy’s 'The Road,' and the structure of Picasso’s cubist women, Yuknavitch’s Small Backs of Children (SBOC) is a work of art. Set around one event from multiple points of view, including the writer (author), Yuknavitch has given us the story of the birth of art, that of violence on the body, from where art is made. Rather than a linear plot function, scenes echo out from an act of war all too familiar. The construct is beautiful. The notion that art is born from great suffering is not new but I’ve never seen it depicted like this. Unflinching. Female. Art in SBOC is made from the female body subjected to brutal violence. The violence of war, rape, childbirth, and death. The stuff of daily life. In the story, one act receives accolades for the artist, and so garners media attention. Wife, mother, daughter, artist, writer are redefined; art is made of their own agency. SBOC is filled with evocative imagery; beautiful, but like nature with its sublime aesthetic. Sentences stopped me dead still on nearly every page with their lyrical beauty. Repeatedly, I had to stop reading and hold the book to my body to sit with my thoughts. Ultimately art, born of violence too brutal to comprehend, leads to healing. I am not saying it’s a comforting read, but I don’t think it was meant to comfort. This is an important, intelligent book, it’s a force. Admittedly I am a great an of Lidia Yuknavitch’s writing. There’s no one like her alive and writing today. Her art is lasting art, and SBOC is a major contribution to statements made about our culture.

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By the end of the first chapter, I loved it so much I bit it. When you read Lidia Yuknavitch, her words will enter your bloodstream and will not leave you; she changes what it means to have a body. Yuknavitch tells stories not only through the meaning of words, but the way those words appear on the page; changing the nature of reading. She writes ordinary lives in their most primal moments, at the core of what it means to be human: in greif and sex and and success and violence and anger. The largeness of this story is too much to hold in a mouth.

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This is sure to be what we call an "important work", a classic. Yuknavitch is - always has been, always will be - an absolutely FEARLESS writer. Fearless with language, fearless with structure, fearless in her exploration of the totality of human sensation, in all its ugliness and beauty. And her great field of creation has always been the female body. In this latest work, she's broken through - structurally, conceptually, thematically - to create an absolutely original novel; these pages emerge FROM the bodies of girls and women. In doing so, she's created a new literary from, I believe, a new terrain. This is a great work.

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Lidia Yuknavitch's writing has saved my life and my heart a million times. This book will tear you apart and save you, too.

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This book is a heart bleeder. It is sensual, exhilarating, cataclysmic. It is a novel as ars poetica. Lidia Yuknavitch merges every genre of art into this book: it's a alchemical, it grows stronger with readership, art feeding art ad infinitum. Yuknavitch has the courage and artistry to write about the tragedies inflicted by war and violence and to do something transformative with that enormous force of power that most of us are too scared to touch. Whatever you are doing--stop, and get this book. This is the kind of art that changes you. This is the new landscape of literature. This is the new wave now.

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Lidia Yuknavitch might be the most important writer you ever discover. She speaks for those of us whose voices catch in our throats. She's writing at and over the edge of new forms, ways of understanding, possibilities of being. She'll hold the door open for you. Take a step inside.