Seide : Roman

Most readers seem to find this book haunting and poetic, but I'm not so sure. It is certainly clever and elegant in its presentation of the story: the folktale-like structure with short chapters and extensive use of repetition, the delicate use of blank pages (where the publishers really make their

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profits), the imagery of birds and silk, etc. I haven't seen the film, but the book is clearly drafted in such a way that you could slot in a few headings and have a ready-made filmscript, so I'm sure it works very well on the screen.

On the other hand, it seems to be little more than a shameless recycling of the old cliché of the industrial West and the passive East, dolled up with a few ironic touches to make it respectable. The eroticism struck me as no more convincing than that of a lingerie advertisement - again, cleverly done, building up slowly, and with an ironic get-out clause so that the author can't quite be accused of sexism or orientalism, but it still seems to be exploiting all the ways of representing women (passive, mysterious, sensual, silent,...) that go with the classic orientalist approach.

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"Hervé Joncour buys and sells silkworms for a living. His small French town depends on him for its livelihood. Each year, Joncour travels to exotic locations around the world to acquire the silkworms. But one year, an epidemic strikes silkworms all over the world. Or nearly the whole world.

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There's still Japan. And that is where Joncour journeys, to meet a wealthy village lord and his beautiful young mistress. There he will find what he's looking for, and so much more."

As strong and light as the finest Japanese silk. This is a delicately written book, very hard to describe.

On Joncour's first trip to Japan, he encounters a woman whose image will obsess him. They never speak, they never touch. He cannot read the note she sends him. The jacket blurb calls this "a story of adventure, sexual enthrallment, and a love so powerful that it unhinges a man's life." I think that is a completely misleading description of this book. It is not about sex, it is not about love, not, even, about obsession or desire. It is about how a dream invades one's life, even as one goes about daily living.

The language is spare and elegant, like sumi-e. Images of the feel of silk, the sound of birds, the scent of flowers, repeat. Repetition is important to Baricco. Each of Joncour's journeys from France to Japan is described in nearly identical words, as is each return journey. But rather than pall, this device heightens the anticipation of arrival.

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A tale, but not a tale. A novel, but not a novel. A sad story, but not a sad story. A love story, but not a love story. Silk is everything summed up in a few lines. A masterpiece.

This slim little novella tells the tale of a 19th century silkworm merchant in beautiful, poetic, sometimes repeating prose that is at once lyrical and spare, creating a dreamlike, hypnotic effect. Herve Joncour buys silkworm eggs for the growing silk industry of Lavilledieu in southern France.

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When the silkworm supply of Europe and the Near East is affected by the spotted disease pebrine, Joncour is determined to travel to Japan, forbidding and mysterious, with a deep distrust of foreigners, and a ban on the sale of silkworm eggs to them.

"This place Japan, where precisely is it?" "That way, and keep going." He said. "Right to the end of the world."

In Japan, he meets Hara Kei, a powerful baron who has control over Joncour's silkworm prospects, as well as his safety and life. "The whole village existed for that man; there was scarcely a single action, up in those hills, that was not to protect him or do him pleasure. Life was a subdued hum, it proceeded with a slackness of pace, like a beast threatened in its lair. The world seemed centuries away." At a meeting with Hara Kei, Joncour encounters his concubine, in a profoundly sensual and erotically charged scene, and they are passionately drawn to each other. Like a mermaid's siren, she draws him back to Japan again and again, though they never speak or touch.

Each time Joncour travels to and from Japan the prose repeats, giving the story the feel of a fairy tale, and making Japan as fantastical as the underground land of the 12 Dancing Princesses, or Avalon. The book is both enchanting and wistful.

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This slight book, which can be read in an hour or so, is possibly the most romantic love story I've ever encountered. In spare, beautiful prose,Allessandro Baricco tells the story of Herve Joncour, a French silk merchant, who in 1861 establishes the first silkworm trade of its kind between Japan

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and France. While in Japan, he meets a lovely young woman who haunts his very being, although they never say a word to each other.

What transpires between this young woman, Herve and his wife, Helene is a beautiful story of love, tenderness and sacrifice. I found myself holding my breath through most of the lovely passages. Fable-like in its simplicity,historically accurate, beautifully told and highly recommended.

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Silk is a short novel—so short that I finished reading it within the space of an hour two. It’s the story of Herve Joncour, a French merchant of silkworm eggs, who travels to Japan. While there, his attention is caught by a young woman, with whom he has an affair.

As I’ve said, this is a

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pretty short novella—my edition is only about 90 pages, most of which is white space. There are lots of short chapters in this book, lots of short sentences, ideas half realized. The love affair between Herve and the young woman in Japan is so muted and mysterious that it’s nearly indiscernible. There’s not much characterization, so we don’t ever really get to know Herve or any of the other characters in this book (his love interest isn’t even given a name!). This makes it very hard for the reader, in the end, to really care about the characters—or the love story.

For such a short book, there’s a lot of repetition, too; the author mentions over and over again how Herve’s paramour doesn’t have oriental eyes, or Herve’s numerous trips from France to Japan and back again. And what's with the obsession with Lake Baikal, which has nothing to do with the story? I’m sure there’s a lot of emotional wealth to this book, but I just didn’t “get” it, I guess. I lived in Japan for a while as a child, and the details on Japanese culture are a bit suspect and sketchyt—as are the descriptions of the West in the 1860s. It’s not that this is a bad book, it’s just that I didn’t particularly care for it.

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A beautifully written quaint little book, discovered via another review here. I love the language, which reads like an old-fashioned fairy tale, full of insightful observations. My favourite has to be:

'He was one of those men who like to be observers at their own lives, any ambition actually to

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participate in them being considered inappropriate. It will have been noted that such people observe their destiny much as most people tend to observe a rainy day.'

I also thought the ending was particularly poignant. Just a shame that there are only ninety pages of very brief exchanges, but the story is none the less effective for that.

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A slight (88 small pages) but rich novella of a 19th century silk merchant who travels to Japan and falls in love with a concubine, without ever exchanging words with her. "Silk" is like a beautiful piece of music with motifs repeated throughout and each of the merchant’s journeys to Japan is a

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variation on a theme. The language is spare but lyrical and caught me up completely. A quick but very satisfying read.

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I would have loved to have been able to read this in the original Italian, but as I can't I have to celebrate Ann Goldstein's translation which is beautifully delicate, just like the material it describes. I don't want to give too much of the story away, but just as a silkworm spins its thread,

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this book spins the tale of French silkworm merchant Herve Joncour's obsession for a Japanese concubine This is definitely a book where 'less is more', the chapters are extremely brief, the longest runs to four pages the shortest is just two lines and, like a poem, every word, every chapter break has been carefully considered.

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I read this for a book group evening on erotica. It’s a very short book, something of a fable about love and passion. Most of it is taken up with a slow-building sexual charge. Then there are a couple of explicit, erotic pages – which work because they’ve had 80 pages of build-up. Then the

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tale ends with a bitter-sweet twist that makes one want to re-read the erotic pages again …

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Perhaps the most amazing book I have ever read. Take the hour and read this rich novella.

A short read, even a slow reader could probably finish it in a day. The language is rhythmic and compelling in its repitition of phrases, and the story is sad and sensual.

So many of the reviews about this book say it is a love story, but if it is, it isn't a love story with the main character, Hervé Joncour, as its lead. I found this story to be incredibly sad, miserly and too true. Without giving away plot, I will quote Joni Mitchell, a bit out of context..."Don't

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it always seem to go, that you don't know what you got 'til its gone."

This is a translation but I can say something about the words, even though the words I read are not ones chosen by Baricco. In Ocean Sea, Barrico positions paragraphs so they remind the reader of waves lapping a shore. At least that was my impression. In this book he leaves lots of blank space...the silence that so permeates this story. He also uses lots of repetitive passages, though changing one details each time, and I have not figured out why, but would love to hear ideas.

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What a sensual book, from its cover to its narrative. And deceptively easy to read. I found each journey he takes to Japan, where the lake is called by a different name on each trip to be significant of the changing relationship. I missed that the story echoed that of the silk worm's life cycle. In

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fact, I'm sure I missed a whole heap of symbolism, but it was so beautifully written that I found myself reading without stopping. I wonder what it's like in the original Italian. The translation seeems to be ever so sensitive.

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More a prose peon than anything else,of short story length. a french man engaged in the silk trade travels regularily to the close world of ?19th century Japan , falls in love with a Japanese woman and she with him but they are barley able to talk and are culturay and socially seperate.
Exquisite

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work.

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This was a refreshingly quick, yet beautiful read. Though I tend to shy away from short stories, I found myself very engaged in this easy-to-read format and once I started I just kept going. After reading some other reviews I realize that there was a fair amount of symbolism in this story, and I

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think I didn't fully appreciate that fact until just now. I have the movie version of this reserved in my movie queue, so I'm rather curious as to how it will play out on the big screen.

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This is a spare, lyrical prose poem that you will read all too quickly and then want to start over and read it again at a more leisurely pace. Lovely little read.

a fable of love -- 19th century travel to Japan.

A very short but beautifully written story of a French man who has to go to Japan to bring back silkworms. He meets a Japanese noble man and falls in love with his concubine even though he never speaks to her or touches her. She sends him notes in Japanese that he cannot read. a very quick read for

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our Xmas choice.

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A short read, even a slow reader could probably finish it in a day. The language is rhythmic and compelling in its repitition of phrases, and the story is sad and sensual.

Beautiful, if somewhat mysterious, short tale of man who travels to edge of the known world, Japan, to procure silkworms, and who mysteriously falls in love.

Ok book. Not as good as advertized.
Read it in about 1.5 hours.

This was a very short work—but even despite that—the story was very sweet. It was about a French silk breeder, Herve Joncour, who would make the perilous journey to Japan just for the silk worm eggs (which sometimes would not survive the journey). Upon first arriving there, he made friends with

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the local Japanese baron. He also became infatuated with the baron’s concubine – of whom he never cheated on his wife with – but he fantasized. Herve makes several more journeys to Japan, but one trip, he finds the village to be under civil war and he is banished from ever coming back. As the years roll by, Herve’s wife, notices his sadness and she visits a Japanese woman in the nearest town, and commissioned her to write a letter – letting the reader (Herve) believe that it’s from the concubine. With this closure, Herve was able to let go.

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A beautiful short novel that combines a spare and elegant prose with an enthralling story of 19th century cross-cultural romance. The story begins in a provincial French town in the middle of the century, where a young Frenchman becomes involved in the developing silk industry. (The tone is

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perfection: having just read Madame Bovary, it seemed to me that Baricco was able to channel the spirit of the time and place amazingly well). The industry's key problem is the lack of a reliable source of healthy silk worm eggs, so the young man travels to Japan (still cut off from the rest of the world) to find them. In Japan he does find the eggs, but he also meets a Japaness grandee who speaks French, and the grandee's beautiful (and silent) mistress, whose long glances the young man cannot forget -- . The story winds on from there, bringing in the hero's relationship with his wife (who has a beautiful voice) and the impact of history on the links among the characters. A very beautiful novel, and at times a very erotic one.

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