I’d heard of Silk before and as I was in an Italian literature mood, I figured I’d try it.

According to the blurb at the back of my

edition, it’s a cult novel by one of the most gifted Italian writers of his generation. Hmm. Not my kind of literary religion then.
The novel is set between France (the Vivarais, in Ardèche) and Japan around 1860. Let me tell you the thin plot. Hervé Joncour
lives in a village whose main industry is silk. When European silkworms die from an unknown disease, Hervé Joncour is sent to
Japan to bring back larvae for the business to survive. The villagers pay for his trip and he needs to come back with living larvae.

Silk is hard to describe. Hervé Joncour goes back and forth between France and Japan. Discovering Japan is a life-changing
experience, probably but nothing is said. You just assume. It’s a novel with a strange character you don’t get attached to. He’s
always called Hervé Joncour, never Hervé. It gives the impression of a man who never loses his tie and walks with a broom in his
back. There are some descriptions of Japanese customs but you watch them without a clue, just like the main character.
The style is ristretto like an Italian coffee. I guess it’s supposed to be powerful. It didn’t work for me although I’m usually a good
audience for this. I love short sentences with an unusual use of the language. The writer needs to be very good for me to enj oy
paragraph-long sentences. Short books composed with short sentences can hit you like a fist. But it’s the prerogative of excellent
writers as it is hard to say a lot in a few pages. Here, the effects seem fabricated. For example, each time Hervé Joncour travels,
Baricco writes the same paragraph to describe his itinerary, like in fairy tales. Great idea on paper but it sounded fake like a trick
learnt in a writing class.
He crossed the border near Metz, walked through
Württemberg and Bayern, entered in Austria, reached
Vienna and Budapest by train, rode twenty thousand
kilometers through the Russian steppe, crossed the Ural
mountains, entered in Siberia, and traveled forty days
before reaching the Baikal lake that local people called:
sea. He flew down the Amour river along the Chinese
border till the Ocean, stayed eleven days in the Sabirk
harbor until a ship of Dutch smugglers brought him to
Capo Terya, on the West coast of Japan.
I didn’t buy the Japanizing paraphernalia either. I found it a bit clichéd, the landlord, the geisha, the secret traditions. I also
thought the double silent love story really hard to believe. Two women silently pining for dull Hervé Joncour? Come on!

I suppose it’s a go/no-go kind of book, like a Paulo Coelho. Either you fall for it or you don’t. Well, I didn’t but I understand that
some do. I felt no emotion when it is clear that its aim was beauty and emotion. I expected better than that from such a praised
writer. Has anyone read it?

When an epidemic threatens to destroy the silk trade in France, the young merchant Herve Joncour leaves his doting wife and his
comfortable home in the small town of Lavilledieu and travels across Siberia to the other end of the world, to Japan, to obtain eggs
for a fresh breeding of silk worms. It is the 1860s; Japan is closed to foreigners and this has to be a clandestine operation. During his
undercover negotiations with the local baron, Joncour's attention is arrested by the man's concubine, a girl who does not have
Oriental eyes. Although the young Frenchman and the girl are unable to exchange so much as a word, love blossoms between them,
conveyed by a number of recondite messages in the course of four visits the Frenchman pays to Japan. How their secret affair
develops and how it unfolds is told in a narration as beautiful, smooth and seamless as a piece of the finest silk. (less)