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Silk
Customer Reviews
Rating:  - 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 beauty and eroticism.
This is the tale of Hervé Joncour, a silkworm merchant who is married to the beautiful Hélène Joncour. Hervé is convinced by Baldabiou, a businessman, to travel in search of silkworm eggs in order to save the silk-making business. During his travel to Japan, he becomes infatuated with a Japanese concubine. When he returns home to France, he cannot forget the Japanese beauty and continues to obsessively long for her.
Rating: - As soft, subtle and exquisite as the finest...
Alessandro Baricco knows the fine art of storytelling. His use of colors, tenderness, eroticism and time weave a most beautiful canvas print of words.
Silk is the International Bestseller about Hervé Joncour, a thirty two year old Frenchman living in the 1860's. While on leave from the Armed Forces, Joncour meets with a friend, Baldabieu, who is a successful owner of multiple silk mills in Lavilledieu, their small French village. After telling Joncour the devastation that will soon hit the area due to a sickness in the silkworms, and a grand and wonderous answer to the problem in traveling to faraway Japan, Joncour decides to accept the challenge and make the journey.
The beauty in the story is wrapped in the silk that is Joncour's travels... all that he sees, experiences and feels, and the people he meets in a world so unknown to his own. Blend in the warm receptions upon his return by his wife Hélén, and the slow weaving of an burning enigma through the chance encounters with a beautiful women in Japan and...
Well, I'll let Baricco tell you the story, for it truly is amazing. And, this was a very fast read. At less than 200 pages, I was able to read it in one sitting, which I never do. An excellent story told with such elegance and eloquence will leave readers wanting more. I definitely recommend reading the book before watching the movie, which is an impeccable translation from book to screen, and one of the most beautiful adaptations ever, in every sense of the word.
Rating:  - let's calm down
this novella's a breezy, engaging read, but it's principally a sketch and insufficiently developed to justify, in my view, the accolades it's getting from most reviewers. the story seems to me to exploit (and not so originally) a very basic, primitive fantasy. there's a somewhat neat twist towards the end, but still, it's pretty much a fluff piece, as i read it. this man can write, no question, but this is a light, not deep, book, whose impact dissipates quickly.
Rating: - Literary Beauty
This tale is not for the reader who needs books to think for them. This book is about understanding: Understanding life, understanding love, and understand self.
Some readers will not see the multiple symbols placed before them when they read it. A bird is a bird, but not in this book.
Free expressions paint before the reader - freedom, choice, and sacrifice.
The style is beautiful to read in this short novel with a heartbreaking ending.
Read Silk and learn what truelove is all about.
Wolfe
Rating: - Silk spins a soft cocoon of sensual surreptitiousness.
This little novella magically flows with beautifully poetic imagery woven into a stunning love story that seduces you from the beginning.
The year is 1861 and the booming silk trade in Europe has hit a wall.... disease has spread in the eggs of the silkworms throughout the continent and continues it's reach into the Middle East and beyond.
Japan remains unaffected by the silkworm epidemic and is rumored to possess the finest silk available.
Hervé Joncour is a buyer and seller of silk worm eggs for the silk mills in the France. His travels previously took him to Egypt and other African ports. With the silkworm epidemic, he is forced to travel a very dangerous and uncharted route over half the known world to Japan. Travel takes months and the Japan's ports are hostile and closed to foreigners. He manages to be smuggled in and makes the right connections.
But the stakes are high, for if he is caught taking silk worm eggs out of Japan, death will be swift.
Unrequited love paves the novel's complex and tempestuous end; an end that will beg examination.
The last sentence of the book is "Once in a while, on windy days, he walked down to the lake and looked at it for hours. There he had the idea that he saw, sketched on the surface of the water, the inexplicable and luminous spectacle that his life had been".
Erotic, sensual, and poetic; a fascinating tale!
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