A Dreamlike Romantic Adventure, All Wrapped Up in Silk

Like the torn edge of gossamer silk, the first sentences of this dreamlike romance read jaggedly. A French soldier, Herve Joncour, ends up “earning his crust” as a silkworm trader. He “bought and sold the silkworms when their being worms consisted in being tiny eggs.” After hatching and gorging on mulberry leaves, each larva “saw to incarcerating itself afresh in a cocoon.”

It is not clumsiness. It is the equivalent of a birch-twig lashing in a Finnish sauna. The roughness abrades and cleanses, it opens the pores, it readies us for the subtle and unexpected rhythms of Alessandro Baricco’s astonishing novella and Guido Waldman’s supremely intelligent translation from the Italian.

“Silk” tells of Joncour’s four journeys to Japan in the 1860s on behalf of his patron Baldabiou, founder of a prosperous silk industry in southern France. His mission is to acquire silkworm eggs to replace those destroyed in a worldwide blight from which Japan, only just opened to a few foreign traders, has been spared.

Joncour does his business with Hara Kei, a powerful nobleman, who puts him up at his park-like estate. An unconsummated but shiveringly erotic passion flares between Joncour and Hara Kei’s mistress, a beautiful, childlike woman with mysteriously European features.

Civil war breaks out; on his last visit, Joncour finds Hara Kei’s estate destroyed. The nobleman, his mistress in tow, has taken to the roads as an itinerant bandit; he threatens the Frenchman with death and orders him not to return. Joncour spends his last years in melancholy obsession in France, using his own wealth to build a Japanese-style park and water garden around his house.

These things and more are contained in 90 brief pages divided into 65 chapters, each with the pulse of a heartbeat. “Silk” has the brilliant colors, the compressed life and the enchantment of a miniature.

Baricco has written a moving allegory about life as a quest, sped by illusion and slowed by its fading. It has moments of stylization, part playful and part suggestive. The accounts of Joncour’s four journeys to Japan, for example, drolly unfurl the same detailed route-map: Metz, Wuerttemberg, Bavaria, Vienna, Budapest, Kiev, 2,000 horseback kilometers to the Urals, 40 days through Siberia past Lake Baikal, and so on.

As we follow Joncour by the light of his adventures and his obsessive passion, we are lit in turn by the reflections and double images it casts on us. Two key words recur: “invisible” and “nothing.” Both are linked to the silk of the title: silk of an ultimate fineness and delicacy, translucent and so light as to fit in a thimble. It is the bright object of desire and the next thing to nonexistent. It is Joncour’s illusion and delusion.

So is Hara Kei’s mystery woman, who appears in the guest quarters one night and lightly caresses Joncour while his eyes are closed. Another night she brings him a servant to make love to. Gradually she merges with the figure of Joncour’s wife, who hauntingly resembles her and who loves him faithfully all the while he is lost in erotic obsession at the other end of the world. The final merging is a stroke of shattering effect; the book’s most brilliant and moving episode.

If “Silk” is an allegory, it is also an entrancing narrative. Each of its figures is a symbol, in part, but also as distinctly alive as characters in the best theater: more alive up on the stage--and with no more than a word or a gesture--than our neighbor in the next seat. The mystery woman may be the symbol of questing illusion, and possibly nonexistent, but she is vividly and specifically erotic. Helene, Joncour’s wife, is the symbol of faithful love, but she is touched once or twice by a quicksilver inconstancy.

Hara Kei, a hospitable host with lessons to teach, is transformed with no break in our sense of his reality into a man of dangerous violence. Joncour’s patron at home, Baldabiou, has Magus qualities--he vanishes Merlin-like at the end--but also a wonderfully comic directness.

With the silk business no more than a notion, he visits City Hall and shoves a silk scarf into the face of the doltish mayor. “What is it?” the mayor asks. “Money,” Baldabiou replies. Later when the business thrives, he drops 30,000 francs on the mayor’s desk. “Money?” the demoralized mayor hazards. “Wrong. It’s proof that you’re a blockhead.”

Allegory and human quiddity are stitched as subtly as the pattern on Joncour’s silk. At the end, old, alone and reflective, he walks in his “Japanese” garden:

“He would go down to the lake and spend hours in contemplation of it because he seemed to descry, sketched out on the water, the inexplicable sight of his life as it had been, in all its lightness.”