Reading 1001 discussion

Read 2015
Very good! This really is a quick read and therefore there is no excuse for why I put off reading this one so long. This is a story written by an Italian author with the protagonist a French man and the setting is a town in France. The time is 1861 and the story is about the silk industry. The silk worms have a disease and are not healthy enough to keep the silk industry going, the answer is to travel to Japan. The problem is Japan is closed to outsiders.

The first chapter tells the reader that this is 1861, "Flaubert was writing Salammbô, electric light remained hypothetical, and Abraham Lincoln, beyond the Ocean, was fighting a war of which he was not to see the finish."

The protagonist--Hervé Joncour was thirty-two. He bought and sold. Silkworms.

"He crossed the frontier near Metz, travelled the breadth of Württenberg and Bavaria, entered Austria, reached Vienna and Budapest by train, thence to continue as far as Kiev. He travelled two thousand kilometres of Russian Steppe on horseback, crossed the Urals, entered Siberia, continued for forty days until he reached Lake Baikal, known locally as "the sea". He descended the course of the River Amur, skirting the Chinese border as far as the Ocean, and when he arrived at the Ocean he stopped in the port of Sabirk for eleven days, until a Dutch smugglers' ship conveyed him to Cape Teraya on the west coast of Japan. Taking secondary roads, he crossed the provinces of Ishikawa, Toyama and Niigata on foot, crossed the province of Fukushima, and reached the town of Shirakawa, passed to the east of it, waited two days for a man in black with a blindfold...." This repeats each trip and the return trip..."boarded a Dutch smugglers' ship at Takaoka, which took him to Sabirk. Thence he skirted the Chinese border as far as Lake Baikal, travelled four thousand kilometres over Siberian soil, crossed the Urals, arrived back in Kiev and crossed the whole of Europe by train, from east to west, until after a three months' voyage he arrived in France. The first Sunday in April--in time for High Mass..."
"The government had sent to Nîmes a young biologist who was to make a study of the disease that was effectively making French silkworm eggs unusable. His name was Louis Pasteur. He worked with microscopes..."

This little book is also a love story.

Rating: 4 stars


Short book that tells the downfall of the silkworm trade in 19th century France. After an epidemic threatens to decimate the French silkworm industry, a silkworm merchant travels to Japan to buy more eggs and falls in desperately love with a Japanese nobleman's young mistress. The book explores themes such as politics and the anti-Western feelings in Japan during that time. Overall, a great book and a quick read. I enjoyed the story and Baricco's poetic style of writing. I have since learned that there is a movie based on this book.

This novella was a mere 135 perfect pages describing a world where an obsession quietly grows against a background of cultural differences. We learn about the history of the silk trade, and the isolation and wars in Japan. We are introduced to a handful of characters who, although there is not enough time to give them fully rounded personalities, all have a unique place in their world. In few words and few actions, we know an awful lot about them. Also, I felt that the author gave us a beautiful rendition of longing that was both erotic and sensual without confrontation and lived within a world of the everyday nature of humans.
I really loved the writing style, in which the author repeats phrases and uses almost equivalent phrases to grace us with his vision.
A real delight.