Ocean Sea

It’s a rare novel that inspires one to learn a new language just to be able to read it in its original tongue. Alessandro Baricco’s Silk and Ocean Sea are two such books.

The 65 chapters of Silk each no longer than four pages, have been translated into 27 languages, and reviewers around the world have lauded the powerful work as “vividly erotic” (the Los Angeles Times) and a “heartbreaking love story…a literary gem of bewitching power” (the London Sunday Times). After winning most of Europe’s most prestigious literary awards, Baricco has finally stepped onto the world stage.

Like Silk, Ocean Sea is a haunting tale of love and revenge. A handful of disparate lives — each of them perilously unwhole — converge at a remote seaside inn: a lovelorn professor searching for the sea’s end; a painter trying to capture its beginning; an inscrutable seductress banished by her husband; and a beautiful young girl, terminally ill, brought to the sea by a desperate father’s last hope.

An intricate web of associations and fates begins to expose itself, but it is not until the arrival of an enigmatic sailor named Adams that the truth in all its phantasmagoric beauty and hideous cruelty becomes clear. Adams may furnish the key to the girl’s salvation, but only the fulfillment of his obsessive secret intention — to avenge a murder — can complete the journey that has brought him from the ends of the earth.

Part adventure-romance, part philosophical inquiry, both playful and profoundly serious, Ocean Sea surges with the hypnotic power of the waves.