First, let me say wow. This is moving on so many levels. It really hits me in the heart, deep down. I don't why, exactly. But I think had to do with the family values expressed in the opening paragraph and again near the end of the middle. The way the father passionately defends his family through poverty and oppression by the resurgent fascists touched me. From the point of view of this middle child, who you've so elegantly named Five--a beautiful allusion to Platonism, if I may add--we get this sense of desperation and deep, unresolved tension in the household. I couldn't quite place the time frame, though I have a sense of contemporary with a strong Victorian overtone. As if you'd painted a streak down a long, old wall right over top the peeling wallpaper of intimacy in a long abandoned building. Whispers of ghosts. I felt the sexual themes were a bit contrived, but that's okay. It's your work and European views on sexuality are a tad more loose than American values. I love seeing foreign works translated. They give me a sense of globalization I normally only see from the American side, with McDonald's and Coca Cola penetrating all aspects of world culture.
Maybe I'm misreading the translation, or getting a story you had no intention of presenting. The family values strike home to me as a modern example of the nostalgia of 1950's America, pushed out on the world as a blanket of tradition in the aftermath of the War. It has a bit of Civil Rights, and a whole lot of political intrigue for such a short work, but I find the feminist angle to be most supreme. The sensory description was second to none. I truly smelled the vanilla and felt the grinding sand beneath the bare feet of the protagonist, Five, as he finds his place in this oddly symmetrical world of black and white morality, with no acceptance for his greyness. I would have like to have seen a little more of Five's sisters, but that's okay.
9.2/10 A pretty good story on traditional values under the inescapable boot of poverty and fascism.
