"Silk" (Alessandro Baricco)

In 1861, the silkworms begin to die.  Herve Joncour and the rest of the citizens living in his small town in France have made their living from silkworms and aren’t sure what to do next. Trips just to Syria and Egypt will not bring back the healthy, thriving silkworms to fuel their economy.  Businessman Baldabiou then tells Herve that the silkworms in Japan are still thriving, legendary for the quality of their silk.  Bidding his lovely wife Helene good-bye, Herve sets off for Japan a total of four times, finding not only silkworms but also a quiet, passionate love in exotic, closed-off Japan.
This book is very short, less than 200 pages long, but the amount it packs into those 200 pages is truly breathtaking.  In the space of page-long chapters, Baricco successfully conveys such strong emotion that as a reader, I was deeply moved.  Without speaking, Herve falls in love with a mistress of Hara Kei, his silkworm contact in Japan.  The mistress stands out because of her distinctly non-Japanese eyes which linger on Herve throughout the interview.  With both elaborate and quiet gestures, the couple make their love known to each other, but they will never be able to express it.  Through it all, what part does Herve’s wife Helene have to play?  They love each other but how will Herve reconcile his two passions?
Except for a few times, Baricco doesn’t have to spell out what his characters are feeling.  The beauty of his words, his descriptions of their actions, and the build-up of the characters themselves show us how they are feeling.  Something else I liked was the way this book taught about cultures in the latter half of the 19th century.  Through these characters and their interactions, we learn about the culture of wealthy French people, about the east-west divide through all that Herve has to surmount not just to get to Japan but to even talk with the people who live there, and about the silkworm business and trade. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Translator Translated" by Anita Desai

Image
Prema Joshi is a “prematurely aged” instructor of English literature at a girls’ college, “a tired woman going home from work with nothing to look forward to, nothing to smile about,” who sees a way out of her malaise when she unexpectedly gets a chance to translate into English a set of short stories written in one of India’s many regional languages. The focus here is the hierarchy that separates writer and translator, with the latter clearly in an inferior position and frustrated by it, and what happens when a translator violates that order. But Ms. Desai also uses the novella for satiric purposes, perhaps to exact vengeance on some literary nationalists in India; at one point Prema and her publisher attend a conference where they are hectored by “a pudgy man in a sweat-stained suit,” who imperiously demands to know, “What made you decide to translate these stories into a colonial language that was responsible for destroying the original language?” ... "Translator Transla...
Read more

"House of Lies"

Image
As pitches go it can't have been an easy one: "So our new show, House of Lies, is about a bunch of cut-throat management consultants and the way in which they con corporate clients out of money each week. As the strapline has it: Meet the One Per Cent sticking it to the One Per Cent. Yes, that's right, it's a half-hour comedy about wealthy slicksters screening right in the middle of one of the biggest economic depressions America has experienced. Good joke, huh?" The answer is er, no, not really. House of Lies, which will air on Sky Atlantic later this year, has many things going for it: an outstanding cast, including the charismatic Don Cheadle as the company's fast-talking boss, Marty Kaan, a devious expert at the art of the soft-sell; some genuinely funny one-liners; slick cinematography and a willingness to take risks with the format (Marty often breaks the fourth wall to explain to the television audience what certain terminology means, or how his ...
Read more

"The World we Found" (by Thrity Umrigar)

Image
A crisis reconnects four young firebrands from college who have grown apart as adults, in a story dense with sensitive scrutiny. Straddling India and the United States, this tale of friends reunited in disparate maturity is heavy on internal reflection, lighter on events. The highpoint of Armaiti, Nishta, Laleh and Kavita’s student years in late-1970s’ Bombay was their involvement in political activity, in particular a demonstration that saw two of them arrested. Now, three decades later, Nishta, renamed Zoha, has spent years in an oppressive marriage to Iqbal, a Muslim who has grown very devout. Impulsive Laleh is comfortably settled with her influential husband Adish and children; architect Kavita has finally come to terms with her lesbianism; and, in America, Armaiti has just been diagnosed with an incurable brain tumor, a catastrophe that pulls the four together again at Armaiti’s request. Laleh and Kavita are free to leave India immediately but Nishta has to be found, persuaded...
Read more