Reading Matters

'Silk' by Alessandro Baricco

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 104  pages; 1997. Translated from the Italian by Guido Waldman.

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.

Click to read a review of 'Without Blood' by Alessandro Baricco

'Without Blood' by Alessandro Baricco

Fiction - hardcover; Canongate Books; 144 pages; 2004. Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein.

When this book popped through my letter box earlier this week (a spontaneous purchase from Amazon.co.uk - I know, you shouldn't let me loose on the internet) I was amazed at how anorexic it looked: 144 short pages filled with relatively large type. I read the book cover to cover in less than an hour and now, forced to try and shape my thoughts about it into some semblance of a review, I feel myself itching to read it again.

The story is essentially a revenge tale, although it is tempered by other human emotions, like love and loss, memory and forgiveness, and how we are all shaped by the events of our past.

It opens with a young four-year-old girl, Nina, being forced to hide in a hole under the floorboards of a country farmhouse in Italy. Here she is safe from the murderous men who brutally kill her father and her brother.

During the killing spree one of the attackers finds Nina's hiding spot but leaves her alone, a moment which we later find out has haunted him his whole life.

Later, when the story leaps ahead, we meet Nina as an elegant woman in her fifties. She has tracked down her 'saviour' and invited him for a drink. He knows that the two other attackers with him on that fateful day have died under mysterious circumstances and he believes that this woman - the girl from the farmhouse - is going to extract her final revenge. But he goes for the drink regardless...

Without Blood is a quiet, understated read. The prose is restrained, economic, minimal. Even the dialogue between characters is clipped and sparse. There is no extraneous detail of any kind, so there is nothing to get in the way of the story. Stripped down to the bare minimum, Baricco is able to demonstrate very clearly how the legacy of that one brutal day of violence has shaped the lives of the two main characters.

Ultimately, this novella may be an incredibly short read, but it is a deeply affecting one that packs a powerful punch. As someone who very rarely re-reads books, I'll be delving back into this one again soon to experience its subtle beauty all over again.