Castles of Rage

“Castles of Anger” is the debut novel by Alessandro Baricco, the one that launched his path to widespread fame. It is from this book that the motifs and intonations of his most striking works—“Silk,” “Sea, Ocean,” “1900: The Legend of the Pianist,” and others—grow. In front of the reader is a meta-novel that at once sounds like a poem about love. Here there is an entire ocean of extraordinary characters: a widow who has never been married, a boy with “syncopated perceptions of life,” a British parliamentarian, the first victim in history of a railway disaster. And for all the variety—ranging from eccentric inventors and adventurers to a mad architect and a proto-avant-garde composer—they are bound together by one thing: in what they did and who they were, something truly beautiful was always present, as Baricco himself notes.