A tangled web
Silk, by Alessandro Baricco
£3.99, Harvill Press (1998)
The breeding of silkworms was once a secret closely guarded by a Japanese elite. Western traders, such as Hervé Joncour, would rarely be offered even the fertilized eggs; when they were, it would be strictly at a certain stage of gestation, and the race would be on to return before the eggs hatched. In such a manner does Joncour spend his days, following the trade routes to the Orient and back on a timescale of seasons and years. Then he finds himself falling in love with the conccubine of Hara Kei, his Japanese contact. His whole world is seized with a great tremor, and when the dust has settled nothing will be the same again.
While writing Silk, Baricco probably had in mind that he was putting together a stylish novel; this self-consciousness has created a rather stylized one instead. The many quirks such as repetition and dwelling on details (the importance of which isn’t immediately obvious) veer between being evocative to being annoying and back, passing through endearing on the way. More difficult to digest than that, though, is the lead character. Joncour is presented as a thoughtful, taciturn man: we are expected to believe that dark currents move beneath his show of repose. But none of them are ever really alluded to, still less rise above the waves. His emotional reactions are tangential: practically unemotional.
A love story where, owing to narrative constraints, the central character could easily be autistic seems an ill-advised proposition. Indeed, it’s difficult to engage at all with Silk on a human level. Still, the conceit of a Western novel told in the cadences and rhythms of Japanese poetry is an exciting one, and there are many set pieces—Joncour’s journey across south-east Europe and Asia—that have a charm all of their own. If only the same could be said of the characters.
posted at: 21:02 |
path: / b / ba-be / baricco_alessandro |
permanent link to this entry
My vibrations will live on
Vertigo, by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac
£5.99, Bloomsbury (1997)
When you die, does your soul pass into another’s? Flavières would once have said no. Once a straightforward-thinking policeman, a terrible accident during a rooftop pursuit of a suspect made him forsake the service for the life of a private investigator. But when he falls in love with his best friend’s wife Madeleine, who he’s trying to protect from herself, and who seems to be channeling the spirit of a suicidal ancestor Pauline, what should he believe? And when Madeleine finally succeeds in killing herself, only for Flavières to find Renée who resembles her to an uncanny degree, what can he think then? Is Pauline truly Madeleine, and Madeleine truly Renée, though the grave separates them all?
Not a word is wasted in this taut, chilling thriller that inspired the Hitchcock film. Initially released in the French as D’Entre les Morts and translated as The Living and the Dead, the book is now typically found under the title of its cinematic equivalent. Flavières moves swiftly and unstoppably, more a plummet than a controlled journey, through the weighty scenes of the case, and the disintegration of his rational mind is frightening to behold. Different locations have their leitmotive in the text, with the fatefulness of the village church contrasting with the warm sleepiness of post-war Marseilles. Every new chapter is a surprise, with twists and turns that are as easy to follow as they are hard to predict.
An updated translation might be welcome: speech is occasionally stilted, even for the 1940s, and it might be said that there’s a French frankness of discussion that seems out of place in the English. But even in its current form Vertigo is a terrible, frightening joy to read, a sweet but poisoned chalice that keeps its most complex flavour until the very last drop.
posted at: 12:49 |
path: / b / bl-bu / boileau_pierre |
permanent link to this entry
It’s good to talk
Talking it Over, by Julian Barnes
£6.99, Picador (1992)
Whose opinion do you trust, when three friendships become a ménage à trois that disintegrates catastrophically? Who is the victim and who is the perpetrator? Is there an innocent bystander, an unsuspecting accomplice, or a selfish socipath in their midst? Can any one character ever be described in such extremes, when everyone might be guilty or blameless to some degree? Julian Barnes attempts to answer, or at any rate pose, these questions in Talking it Over. His three narrators all speak in the first person, discussing their own versions of events, their reactions and calculations, and their readings of each other’s experiences: the last, with varying degrees of accuracy.
It’s an an illuminating portrayal of three incomplete personalities which, while forming a whole that’s just a little too big for the comfort of its component parts, would be unstable with any piece missing. But this method of contrasting first-hand accounts, while illuminating, has its own risks. Lengthy internal monologues have difficulties retaining emotional ambiguity. James Joyce and Mark Haddon both triumphed over the internal monologue’s literalization and crystallization of emotion: the one by sly, ungrammatical undercurrents of id; the other by the transformation of an emotional dysfunction into emotional tension. But while Barnes effortlessly causes the reader’s sympathy to move from one character to the next, by revealing some event or motivation that was never suspected, he nonetheless pins the sympathy in place after each move. We are in no doubt, on any given page, about who we should be rooting for, exactly how they are feeling and who is at fault; when the scene rearranges it quickly clears once more.
The characters, for all their development and internal coherence, often feel like two-tiered constructs, their structure designed specifically to illuminate the difference between how their outer surfaces are perceived and how their inner selves suffer. And there’s much that Barnes doesn’t address here that Beckett’s Endgame covers admirably, even if Barnes is far more accessible. Still, Talking it Over is written with Barnes’ typical and accomplished skill for characters and dialogue, and an attention to detail that serves him well as—almost as editor of these three personal accounts—he juxtaposes opinion with opinion so as to try to approach the truth. Whatever that might be.
posted at: 12:28 |
path: / b / ba-be / barnes_julian |
permanent link to this entry
