Silk (Movie Tie-in Edition)
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3.8 • 15 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The year is 1861. Hervé Joncour is a French merchant of silkworms, who combs the known world for their gemlike eggs. Then circumstances compel him to travel farther, beyond the edge of the known, to a country legendary for the quality of its silk and its hostility to foreigners: Japan.There Joncour meets a woman. They do not touch; they do not even speak. And he cannot read the note she sends him until he has returned to his own country. But in the moment he does, Joncour is possessed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1861, after plague has destroyed the silkworms in the Middle East and Africa, French merchant Herve Joncour travels to Japan--a country of which little is known to the French--in search of healthier, better silk. Flouting a Japanese law against exporting silkworms, Joncour leaves his loving wife for what will be the first of many four-month journeys through Europe, Russia and Siberia to Japan, where he befriends a wealthy Japanese trader and falls in love with his beautiful young mistress. With each trip, Joncour's expectations of closer contact with the young woman escalate, as does the danger of his journey. Joncour finally receives a letter from the concubine, which he must take for translation to a Japanese woman living in a neighboring French village The letter encourages Joncour to travel to Japan one last time; what he finds there will change his life forever. Baricco, winner of the Prix Medicis and other awards for his two previous novels, uses the precise, formal language of the 19th-century realists to evoke exotic settings, vivid characters and historical details. Written in 65 spare chapters (some less than a page long, some evolving into verse), Barrico's fairy tale of East and West weaves a fine, tight fabric of recurrent phrases and motifs, a novel as delicate and strong as its subject. FYI: Silk, a bestseller in Italy and in the U.K., will be published in 16 languages, including Japanese.
Customer Reviews
Short, romantic
It should be read in one sitting. It says the book is 144 pgs. but it is actually only 91 print pages, consisting of short chapters, at most one page long per chapter. Author's writing style is nice, he repeats certain phrases throughout the book but it kind of places you in that era of late 1800s.
It is for a true romantic with a small twist at the end.
I never saw the major motion picture that's based on this book.