Silk

2 hrs. 19 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Alessandro Baricco

Narrator Sergey Shakurov

Description

Italian writer Alessandro Baricco is today one of the most interesting novelists in Europe. His refined books, simultaneously reminiscent of parables, thrillers, and prose poems, have already been translated into dozens of languages and adapted for the stage and screen. Music, philosophy, architecture, painting, history, literature — these are the sources from which he draws his endless subjects, and where his heroes are born: geniuses and eccentrics, dreamers and extravagant inventors; all of his heroes are remembered for a long time: Hervé Joncour from "Silk", Bartleboom and Plasson from "Ocean Sea", Danny Boodmann from "Novecento" — a brilliant musician playing piano in the middle of the ocean, as well as the eccentric writer Mr. Gwyn, who flatly refuses to write books.

The novel has been translated into 16 languages, including Japanese. This last circumstance is explained, apparently, by the fact that the setting of the novel is Japan. The time of action is the end of the 19th century. So no airplanes, washing machines, or psychoanalysis, the author warns us. That will be for another time. But for now — the story of an irresistible passion that took hold of Hervé Joncour, a silkworm merchant from a quiet French province. A mysterious passion that drove the persistent Frenchman to the ends of the earth, to the Land of the Rising Sun — then forbidden to foreigners — toward a woman-phantom, as intangible as silk. And as if woven from a silken thread, the story of this tender passion returns the hero to the true source of genuine love — his faithful wife, who in her thoughts had not been separated from her beloved for a single moment.