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Silk
 
 
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Silk (Paperback)

by Alessandro Baricco (Author), Guido Waldman (Translator)
4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (30 customer reviews)

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Paperback (New edition) £5.99 £4.79 58 used & new from £0.01

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Product details

  • Paperback: 96 pages
  • Publisher: The Harvill Press; New edition edition (7 May 1998)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1860463665
  • ISBN-13: 978-1860463662
  • Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 340,104 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #14 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > B > Baricco, Alessandro

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Product Description

Daily Telegraph
‘An intensely powerful and perceptive drama of the deepest human desires…One of the most astonishing and moving novels I have ever read’ --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Mail on Sunday
‘A haunting and delicately erotic novella’ --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Customer Reviews

30 Reviews
5 star:
 (21)
4 star:
 (8)
3 star:    (0)
2 star:
 (1)
1 star:    (0)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.6 out of 5 stars (30 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Hypnotic tale of loss and longing, 18 May 2006
By kimbofo (London, UK) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)   
This review is from: Silk (Paperback)
This powerful and erotic tale reveals how one's man desire threatens to ruin his life.

It is 1861 and Hervé Joncour is a silk breeder from France who is happily married to the beautiful Helene. Compelled to travel illegally to Japan alone in search of disease-free silkworms, Hervé comes across a "girl who does not have oriental eyes" and, despite not exchanging one word with her, falls deeply in love.

Over the course of several years Hervé continues to make return trips to Japan in order to buy more silkworms and to lay his eyes on the beautiful and intriguing woman to whom he has become enthralled.

When the woman gives him a note that reveals her love for him, Hervé finds his life in France unravelling as he becomes more obsessed with the woman at "the end of the earth". He channels his frustrations into building a beautiful park in the grounds of his home and takes his wife on exotic holidays to hide his unhappiness.

When a second erotically charged letter arrives from his lover he is distraught by the contents, for while it is professes love and devotion it also warns Hervé to never seek contact with her again...

In the style of an old-fashioned fable, Alessandro Baricco has crafted a beautiful and mesmirising novella. Some of the chapters are so short they read more like poems, which greatly adds to the charm and mystique of the story. The writing is hynotic, repetive and deeply affecting.

I read this book in under an hour and found myself greatly moved by the love affair. And the shock ending left me feeling stunned, so much so I wasn't quite sure if I had fully understood what had happened: had I read too much into it?

Ultimately this is an astonishing piece of writing. Heart-breaking, bewitching and passionate.
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars "The inexplicable sight of his life as it had been...", 5 Mar 2006
By N. Clarke (Lancs, UK) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Silk (Paperback)
After medieval attitudes to outsiders and two large fantasy tomes, my most recent read was something of a change of pace: Silk, by Alessandro Baricco - a brief, moving, utterly beautiful fairytale of longing and loss, set predominantly in mid-19th-century France and Japan (& which, I hear, is to be made into a film, with Keira Knightley).

The story centres on Herve Joncour, a young French silk breeder. When silk production in his home town is threatened by disease, he travels to Japan in order to smuggle out uninfected silkworms. There, he finds himself captivated by the concubine of his local contact. Despite the danger, as Japan erupts in civil war, and despite his marriage to the loving but childless Helene, Herve finds excuses to return, repeatedly. Lacking a common language, never exchanging a mutually-intelligible word, and venturing little beyond stolen glances, Herve and the concubine fall in love.

It is told, with an elegant simplicity (one of the review quotes on the back compares the language to that of haiku, and I concur), in the rhythms and logic of fairytale. Lines and passages recur, becoming motifs, like the stylised repetitions of Herve's journeys to and from Japan, which punctuate the two poles of his life, his encounters with the concubine and his repeated reunitings with Helene. In a such a stripped-down narrative, the flashes of imagery - in particular, colours - are especially striking and resonant as evocations of mood and theme. The characters, likewise, are made archetypes, their longings and lusts universalised, larger-than-life.

And the conclusion, of course, is desperately poignant - bringing home, finally, how longings for things that will never be can obscure the things that are.

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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Silken words, 22 Sep 2004
This review is from: Silk (Paperback)
Only 100 pages long a mere haiku of a book but intensely poetic and emotionally charged and very re-readable. In translation from the Italian I personally will never know what it has lost if anything but a wonderful, peaceful, wistful thoughtful read.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars A True Masterpiece
A sensuous, eloquent, rhythmic narrative that reads like poetry. Beautifully tragic.

It very rarely happens that you can pick up a book and once you have read it,... Read more
Published 2 months ago by S. Carter

5.0 out of 5 stars You can't be human if you don't shed a tear or two at the end
Without doubt my favourite short novel. If you've seen the Kiera Knightley film, although it tried to stick firmly to the story it failed to capture the beauty of the novel, and... Read more
Published 3 months ago by D. J. Keyworth

5.0 out of 5 stars Poetic and sensual
`Silk' by Alessandro Baricco is a poetic, sensual novel set in 1862, France. The book is moderately short, but the quality of the writing transports you with the descriptions of... Read more
Published 11 months ago by Farah Yousif

4.0 out of 5 stars Lyrical, sparse and lovely
Certain reviewers compared this to Haiku, but to my mind this has something of the fable about it. It was reminiscent of a more pared down version of Angela Carter's The Bloody... Read more
Published 15 months ago by Mrs. K. A. Wheatley

4.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful but marred
This is a delightful haunting book redolent of Calvino's invisible cities,

but the second love letter is crude and jars in the otherwise parred down writing
Published 18 months ago by G. Williams

4.0 out of 5 stars fairy tale prose
Whilst never unique or monumental enough to be a classic, the charged writing masked within childlike fairy tale prose ensures this slim volume will capture the heart and mind of... Read more
Published on 13 Jul 2006 by deadmanjones

5.0 out of 5 stars A beautiful and sensual novella
Barrico’s ‘Silk’ is the story of Herve, a young man working in the silk industry in Europe. Read more
Published on 1 Jan 2006 by Depressaholic

5.0 out of 5 stars Powefully Pereceptive of human desires...
A rare and wonderful find.Only 104pages long and easily read in one sitting.The prose is haunting and delicately erotic and flows from page to page. Read more
Published on 13 Aug 2005 by Karon.

4.0 out of 5 stars Hauntingly Erotic
This is a very serious book and it very deep. I thought it could have been slightly more light hearted in tone, but aside from that I felt it was very thought provoking and... Read more
Published on 28 April 2005 by dfoisy2

5.0 out of 5 stars breahtaking
I am in awe of this book. It may be short, at only 100 pages, but it contains more depth, thought and beautiful prose than book much longer. Read more
Published on 11 Mar 2004 by paula_mid

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