Roy Kesey’s novella Nothing in the World — winner of the first (hopefully of many) Bullfight Little Book Prize — is the story of a young Croatian soldier drawn into war and wandering away from it in something of a waking-dream. In just over one hundred pages, Kesey’s protagonist Jôsko is richly drawn and fully realized, as is the world he moves through (at least, his increasingly skewed vision of that world).

Nothing is powerful because it maintains a tight but never myopic focus on Jôsko’s experience of much larger events. It is a war story with little political, historical, or military attention paid to the conflict within which it occurs, yet there is enough sense of greater complexity beyond the plotline to simulataneously keep the reader aware a war is in progress and to avoid an insular sense the war only matters because of the protagonist’s involvement.

In her response to the NY Times’ recent list of the supposed best American fiction of the last 25 years, Megan O’Rourke writes:

What’s been lost in the conflation of “small” and “small-minded” is the recognition that small books can be powerful vehicles for big ideas — to say nothing of powerful examples of aesthetic rigor. In his otherwise astute essay accompanying the Times’ list, A.O. Scott succumbed to a form of category confusion when he explained the absence of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried in the top five by noting that they are “small” books that do not “generalize” but “document” — a peculiar misreading of both novels, which hardly shy away from probing large themes, and do so with metaphoric richness. In fact, plenty of big novels do far more documenting than these two masterpieces.

Kesey’s novella succeeds because it doesn’t try to generalize, or to encapsulate the totality of an absurd, violent world through which Jôsko moves. Its scope and scale are precisely, perfectly right for the story it tells, and in that way it is reminiscent of other short (not slight) war novels like David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter (echoed in Nothing‘s battlefield surrealism) and JL Carr’s post-traumatic masterpiece A Month in the Country. David Jones’ In Parenthesis also comes to mind, because even as Jones embeds WWI in an epic view of ancient history, he does so by paying exact and careful attention to the tiniest details of which war and history are made rather than grand events.

Nothing in the World, like those others, never forgets that war is about the lives it destroyed, nor does it assume that the single life being depicted matters any more than all of the others being destroyed beyond the stage of the story.