Silk (original 1996; edition 2000)

Difficult to write something about what I think about this book. On the one hand a story about merchants and their business, on the other hand a love story.
I liked it, the subtility. What happens on the journeys that Hervé is undertaking is not important. It is only Japan and France that seem to be worth describing: buying the eggs and then, after taking them to France, the silk that gives profit. A love in Japan, a wife in France. A woman / girl he never spoke to but falls immediately in love with opposite to his wife, whom he has lived with for several years already. But... are they different? Or maybe not? No way to really find out. But knowing doesn't add any value to the book imho. ( )

This read was a nice break after reading long books. Silk reads like a gauzy flowing breeze. An almost fairy tale with the exotic as background and with travel and some suspense as some of its most palpable elements, it is a not an easy book to put down, precisely because it is so easy to read. The next short chapter with big print draws you immediately in until you suddenly reach the end. As a tale it also has an element of the oral tradition, with periodic repetitions to help its audience remember, repetitions which have bothered some readers, but which for me made the reading faster.

It also has some historical pegs, such as 1861 and Abraham Lincoln and the American Civil War, or the effects of the earlier Treaty that Commodore Perry forced on Japan to open up its borders to Western Trade, or the geopolitical setting of an Asia as the theatre for the colonial wars between the various European powers, when the UK was selling arms to the Japanese government, while the Netherlands supported the rebels as the Japanese civil war erupted. We are also reminded of the opening of the Suez Canal, and more pertinent to the tale, the scientific discoveries of Pasteur related to parasites and silkworms. This was the age when a new explosion of trade changed the nature of the already long established Silk-Route.

But the historical content is just pegs. A different context could have also served for these historical components seem no more than a setting made of cardboard planks. The narration is not factual, but essentially evocative. The language comes across in a poetic mode in the Spanish translation from the original Italian. Many sentences are left open and others are placed here or there, as if they were loose brushstrokes painted with Japanese ink.

Seda or Silk, then comes across as a lyrical legend in which the underlying feeling or theme would seem to be Love. But to me it expressed the more general sentiment of Longing, the longing that is experienced in love, but also in other imaginary trips and landscapes and desires and yearnings.

Because Longing is as slippery and shiny and as smooth as silk.



( )

Silk is a novella told in the spare style of writers like Paulo Coelho and Italo Calvino. It is about Herve Joncour, a frenchman who buys and sells the eggs of silkworms in the mid-1800s. Because there is a blight in the European silkworm eggs, he is sent further and further abroad, eventually ending up in Japan. There he meets a women that he falls in love with, without ever hearing her speak or being intimate with her.

Most of the chapters are less than a page, and the author uses a lot of repetition in his prose to set a dramatic pace for the story. It is very eloquent in its compressed nature, and the writing is quite powerful at times. At other times, it feels a bit forced.

I can't say I loved this book, and I can't say I'll go back and read it again and again, and I can't say that it's an especially heart-rending love story (as purported from the front cover). I can say that it is a very interesting book and worth the hour that it took me to blow through it. ( )

Well, nice try but repetition on a 57 page short novella is not adding any stylistic merit to an otherwise not very believable story. ( )

“Perhaps sometimes life shows you a side of itself which leaves you with nothing more to say”

Let me just start by stating that this was a book that I did not expected to enjoy and only read it because it was on the 1001 list. However, I was very surprised by it. Firstly I read it in sitting which is most unusual, yes it is only a light read only 140 0r so pages long but I found myself totally engrossed with it.

The story is based around a young Frenchman in the 1860s who is involved in the silk trade, travelling around buying silkworms for the mills in his home town. When disease starts to kill off the usual supplies of worms, Herve Jancour is sent to Japan just as the country is being forcibly opened up to outside trade. On arrival Jancour becomes obsessed with the concupine of his new supplier's concupine despite being unable to communicate with her looking forward to his return trip each year despite having a wife back at home and having a fairly relaxed way of life. When war breaks out in Japan Jancour's dreams seem to be falling apart. In the end Jancour settles into a contented routine with his wife in France but there was always a wistful part of him that wanted more. Perhaps it was meant as a metaphor for no matter how happy we may feel to be we are all dreaming of something more of perfection. At first I found it hard to imagine how a man could fall for a woman that he could not even talk to let alone touch but later realised that obsession is not so easy to appreciate.

I loved the author's sparse yet rich use on language which had a deeply poetic feel about it with barely a word wasted. On each trip back to Japan there was a fair bit of repetition but this with subtle differences seemed to only enhance to coming action and I certainly got the impression that Baricco rather had fun playing around with it.

As I stated I had not initially expected to enjoy this book but in the end felt it was a little gem and certainly made me think about what exactly is the definition of true love ( )