Alessandro Baricco

I must start this book review with a confession; I’ve never read any classical works. It’s shameful, I know. I’ve devoured plenty of historical fiction about ancient Greece and Rome and some biographies of famous men, but never read any writers from those times. Terrible. I admit it. There’s no excuse, but there are reasons. First; I hate poetry. Second; I’m suffering from a delusion that the ancients won’t be readable. Third; translations make me wary.

So, why did I start with a show more translation of a translation with writing 180 degrees from the original that also left out huge chunks of the story? Because it was there. I bought it in 2006 and had never read it. It’s been languishing on my shelf that long and now I’m glad I read it. It’s made me want to find a more closely translated version to read, too.

The thing that attracted me to An Iliad (an important distinction to The Iliad) was that it wasn’t in poetic verse. It’s in prose. Woo hoo! No rhyming. No awkward (to my ear) cadences that obscure meaning. Straightforward prose. Real sentences. No rhymes.

I didn’t know when I bought it that it left out the gods though and I’m not sure how I feel about that. My first reaction is that if Homer put them in there, who has the right to take them out. That’s certainly a much bigger liberty than changing from verse to prose or from omniscient 3rd person to first person (which was also done). Seemingly unforgivable, but my modern sensibility appreciates it. I’m an atheist and would no more worship Zeus than I would Allah and so the mythical nature of the gods’ intervention would only serve to distance me from the actual story. With the gods stripped out it seems much more a factual tale than myth. With recent archaeological discoveries it seems the war between the Trojans and Greeks was probably true anyway and putting gods in to make things happen would detract from that realism. Whenever humans take full responsibility for their actions and decisions it has more bite, more heft. It matters. Gods running around moving us like pieces on a chessboard just makes me roll my eyes.

What’s left is a story of man’s most base nature. And I do mean man literally. The men in this novel are appallingly self-centered, narcissistic and weak. The whole species of them. To despise and fear women so completely as to render them property reduced to sexual organs only shows me how weak in mind and character they were. Probably still are if they had their way. As a modern female I can help but see this as an overarching theme even if an unintended one. I can’t believe the whole of Western literature is founded on who gets to put his dick into whom. And even more importantly; who doesn’t.

That aside this is a story of war, but one told from the inside. No battle tactics or troop formations. No general’s machinations and planning. No bird’s eye view. Here is close combat told with a personalization that was startling. Not just men were killed, but how they were killed; specifically. And who was killed; by name. And who did the killing; also by name. So many Greek names as to be dizzying. After a while it almost became like a dance, which I suppose was the point. To make us find beauty in war. It’s there, although you have to really force the metaphor to find it.

I’m no classical scholar, so a lot of high-falutin’ stuff probably eluded me, but I did enjoy reading this in a strange, voyeuristic way. I did it to get a better understanding of Achilles, Hector and Odysseus; names so often referred to in the rest of literature as to be almost without meaning. Over and over they’re used to prop up or illustrate one point after another; some clashing ideas together and creating that confusion. I will probably go on to read other classical works like The Odyssey and The Aeneid; both tales of heroes after the war, but I don’t think I’ll stop reading the companion modern fiction though. show less

This story is special. It involves an impossible passion, a faithful wife, international intrigue, an ending with a twist, all told in beautifully spare language that seems not to suffer at all in translation. Written in Italian about a Frenchman traveling to Japan, translated into English---it shouldn't work at all but somehow the result is a magical 19th century romantic fable. With silkworms.

1861, Hervé Joncour, verheiratet mit Helène, reist zum ersten Mal nach Japan um dort Seidenraupeneier zu kaufen. Dort verfällt er regelrecht der Gefährtin seines Geschäftspartners Hara Kei, einer jungen ätherischen Erscheinung, ohne jedoch ein Wort mit ihr zu wechseln. Bei seiner zweiten Reise wird er am letzten Abend von ihr gewaschen, doch ohne dass er sie zu Gesicht bekommt und ein Wort gewechselt wird. Auf einem Stück Papier das sie ihm zusteckt, steht: 'Kommen Sie zurück oder show more ich sterbe'. Als er ein drittes Mal nach Japan aufbricht, lässt sie ihm eine Geliebte zukommen als wäre diese eine Art Ersatz. Statt, wie man meinen könnte, dass all diese Erlebnisse ihn von seiner Frau entfernen, tritt das Gegenteil ein: Ihre Stimme macht ihn glücklich, er macht zum ersten Mal gemeinsam mit ihr eine Reise, gesteht ihr seine Liebe.

Man könnte es nur als eine schlichte, jedoch wunderschöne und poetische Liebesgeschichte lesen. Doch zuviel im Text weist daraufhin, dass hier auch beschrieben wird, wie zum einen eines der größten Hindernisse in der buddhistischen Lehre überwunden wird: das Verlangen, Begehren. Und wie zum andern die fortgesetzte, vollständige und bewusste Wahrnehmung des gegenwärtigen Moments erreicht wird, eines der Ziele im Zen-Buddhismus.
- Beispielsweise die immerwiederkehrenden fast wortwörtlichen Wiederholungen seiner An- und Abreise, das sich Anblicken der Beiden - Wiederholungen sind eine Übungsweise der Zen-Meditation um den Kopf freizubekommen. Den Kopf, der stets denkt und ein neues Ziel im Blick hat, dass es zu erlangen gilt und dabei das Wesentliche übersieht.
- Auch der Kauf der 30 Morgen Land und die anschließende Umwandlung in einen Park ist ein Weg des Zen: Zengarten, die Kunst der Gartengestaltung.
- Als Hervé seiner Frau Helène erklärt, was eine Volière ist - Vögel hineinzusetzen um sie anschließend fliegen zu lassen: das Aufgeben des Begehrens.
- Die Langsamkeit, die Aufmerksamkeit, die Stille, von denen seine Aufenthalte in Japan stets geprägt sind. All dies sind Merkmale der Zen-Praxis.

Ein kleines Buch, das neben einer wunderschönen Liebesgeschichte noch einiges mehr zu bieten hat. show less

...In every detail, what I had done in those hours—and heard, and said, and seen—was teaching me that it's bodies that dictate life: the rest is a result. I couldn't believe it, at that moment, because, like every young person, I expected something more complex, or sophisticated. But now I don't know any story, mine or anyone else's, that did not begin in the animal movement of a body—an inclination, a wound, an obliqueness, at times a brilliant move, often obscene instincts that came show more from far away. It's all written there already. The thoughts come afterward, and are always a belated map, to which, out of convention and weariness, we attribute some precision...

After her eighteenth birthday, The Young Bride returns to Italy to be married. Her fiancé, The Son, to whom she has been engaged for three years, is in England allegedly on business. She moves in with her fiancé's family—The Father, The Mother, The Daughter, and The Uncle—to await his return. While there, she is divested of her innocence and groomed in the lessons of sexual desire and pleasure.

Interwoven with this sensual and insidious plot is another, that of "the author" who is writing this book. Flipping abruptly between the third and first person, the text becomes a meta-text describing the process of writing and how intimately the author relates to and is present in his work.

I found this novel challenging at first. The main characters are not named, there are no chapter breaks, paragraphs can sometimes run for pages, and the switch in narrative voice was confusing at times. But about halfway through, the "author" clarifies his intent in switching from third to first point of view, and I went back and reread several passages, which started to make sense.

For example, I should have reported to the old friend how, writing about the young Bride, I more or less abruptly change the narrative voice, for reasons that at the moment seem to me exquisitely technical, or at most blandly aesthetic, with the obvious result of complicating the life of the reader; that in itself is negligible, yet it has an irritating effect of virtuosity that at first I even tried to fight, before surrendering to the evidence that I simply couldn't hear those sentences unless they slipped out that way, as if the solid basis of a clear and distinct narrative voice were something I no longer believed in, or that had become impossible for me to appreciate. A fiction for which I'd lost the necessary innocence.

From there I became intrigued and enjoyed the novel much more. So not an easy text, but one which I found interesting in the end. show less