It’s just the right size to fit in your pocket, so you can take it anywhere. You can reread certain phrases while waiting for the bus. And having it on you will help you remember the beauty of the language. I’m talking about the novella Silk (original title Seta) by Alessandro Baricco. A bestselling Italian writer whose work has been translated into languages around the world, Baricco has several prizes to his name.
His main character, Hervé Joncour, lives in France and – like a lot of the men of his village – works in the silk industry. In the 1860s, with a disease infecting Europe’s silk eggs, Joncour’s work takes him to Japan four times to collect eggs there. Although Japan is closed to the world, he manages to get in contact with a Japanese village head who can sell him the prized silk eggs. Here, the Japanese man’s power is signalled not by way of jewels or other precious goods, but by a woman lying in his lap: a woman with non-oriental eyes. A woman with whom Joncour develops a dangerous, secret and strange affair.
The story is delicate. Despite his love for his wife Hélène, Joncour’s love for the Japanese woman is explosive. At a certain moment watershed point in the book, you can sense that things are inevitably going to go wrong; but the plot is nevertheless unforeseen and roundly heartbreaking.
The story itself is touching, partly evoked by Baricco’s use of language. The sentences are short and crystal clear, sometimes with just one word per line. It feels like reading a long poem. But most striking is the cadence of the book. Baricco, also being a musicologist, has written a musical with words. This comes to the fore in the beautiful structure of the sentences and also in the repetition of words or even whole paragraphs. For example, Joncour’s journey to and back from Japan is always captured in the same words, like a repeated music theme.
A weaker part of the book, unfortunately, is the erotic letter that Joncour receives. This is simply too explicit to form a whole with the rest of the novella. But overall, reading this book was like reading a cello suite by Bach.
Welmoed Hoogvorst