Product Description

"Exotic...erotic... Ocean Sea is highly romantic and breathtakingly lyrical."--The New York Times Book Review

With Silk, his first novel to appear in English, Alessandro Baricco immediately proved himself to be a magical storyteller. With Ocean Sea, he has been acclaimed as the successor to Italo Calvino, and a major voice in modern literature.

In Ocean Sea, Alessandro Baricco presents a hypnotizing postmodern fable of human malady--psychological, existential, erotic--and the sea as a means of deliverance. At the Almayer Inn, a remote shoreline hotel, an artist dips his brush in a cup of ocean water to paint a portrait of the sea. A scientist pens love letters to a woman he has yet to meet. An adulteress searches for relief from her proclivity to fall in love. And a sixteen-year-old girl seeks a cure from a mysterious condition which science has failed to remedy. When these people meet, their fates begin to interact as if by design. Enter a mighty tempest and a ghostly mariner with a thirst for vengeance, and the Inn becomes a place where destiny and desire battle for the upper hand. Playful, provocative, and ultimately profound, Ocean Sea is a novel of striking originality and wisdom.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #74119 in Books
• Published on: 2000-06-27
• Released on: 2000-06-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Amazon.com
In Alessandro Baricco's celebrated debut, it was silk that exerted a fatal attraction. This time it's the ocean, whose watery charms cause an entire cast of characters to convene at the isolated Almayer Inn. The guests include a seductress, an eccentric professor, and a painter with a pronounced penchant for metaphysics. They're soon joined by the beautiful young daughter of a local aristocrat, who's been stricken with a mysterious illness. In a sense, however, all these characters are suffering from maladies--psychological, existential, erotic--which makes the Almayer Inn a kind of Magic Mountain with beachfront footage.

The author is a renowned opera critic in his native Italy. Perhaps this accounts for his love of linguistic arias, which can overpower the plot of Ocean Sea. When Baricco gets rolling, of course, his intricately worked prose is a delight. Even the inn itself, situated alone on a promontory, gets the red carpet treatment: "So alone it was there, it seemed a thing forgotten. It was almost as if a procession of inns, of every kind and vintage, had passed by there one day, skirting the coast, when, out of tiredness, one had detached itself from the rest, and, as its travelling companions filed past, it decided to stop on that slight rise, yielding to its own weakness, bowing its head and waiting for the end." At his best, Baricco recalls Italo Calvino--there's the same pleasure in elegant riddles and rococo storytelling. Here and there the narrative of Ocean Sea vanishes down a dead end, and the author's weakness for typographical trickery doesn't help. Still, Baricco's novel remains a refreshing dunk in what Christina Stead called "the ocean of story"--and a brainy exploration of the littoral truth. --Bob Brandeis

From Publishers Weekly
Italian writer Baricco, who wrote this novel before the highly regarded Silk, again delivers a work whose spare, lyrical language and enigmatic episodes culminate in a tale of love and revenge. This story of obsession is a meditation on the sea?its seductive surface and erotic depths with the power to heal or destroy. Mirroring the ebb and flow of the ocean, Baricco's cast of characters complement each other. In 19th-century France, six people are drawn, each for distinct reasons, to a seaside hotel?inhabited only by four precocious, spiritlike children. Researching his scientific book, An Encyclopedia of Limits, Professor Bartleboom seeks the point at which the sea ends; painter Plasson is determined to find where the sea begins. Ann Deveria has been sent by her husband to repent her adulturous ways, while Elisewin, a young, sickly girl, experiences her first love and finds her health restored. Father Pluche, the priest who accompanies Elisewin, discovers the meaning of life; a secretive sailor, Adams, searches for death. For each person, the "sea is a place where you take leave of yourself" in search of his or her mystery; yet each character's story of love, betrayal, murder or redemption is revealed to be inexorably entangled with the others' while the sea bears silent witness to their destinies. It is only through the ripples of Adams's vengeful act that each person realizes his or her destiny. Baricco's prose stylistically echoes his central metaphor: his sentences undulating, breaking and subsiding, a mood that translator McEwan maneuvers beautifully. At times this feat is accomplished masterfully; at others the author's hand is all too apparent, eclipsing the delicate mingling of his intriguing characters with their vengeful and poetic twists of fate.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Baricco's first novel since his international best seller, Silk (LJ 10/1/97), this delicately written work is filled with stirring allegorical imagery but still has more heft than its stylishly slim predecessor. A group of characters meet at a seaside hotel that appears to be managed by a few prescient children. One guest, a young woman with a mysterious depressive illness, has come for an ocean cure that will either kill her or save her. A professor studying the scientific aspect of things observes the ocean's edge, while an artist paints seascapes using sea water as his medium, producing a series of white canvases. The dreamlike scenes are feverish and fitful, sometimes annoyingly incomplete, sometimes shockingly violent. A particularly horrifying episode involving a life raft is told twice, like a recurring nightmare. Is this a meditation on the sea, on revenge, on life and art? It's hard to say. Though beautifully crafted, this work will probably not be to most readers' taste.?Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ., Harrisonburg, VA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Like a rich chocolate cake
Like a rich chocolate cake this book has to be enjoyed in little pieces to fully do it justice. One paragraph, one sentence, one image, at most a chapter at a time! It is so beautiful it literally leaves you breahtless. With just one word or sentence Baricco can create a whole scene, a whole world. It is one of those few books that I keep returning to regularly just to add beauty to my life. There are paragraphs and pages I must have read dozens of times. There is no other book I know that can offer such ethereal, completely honest truth and beauty. It is one of my most priced posessions, something I don't ever want to be without. Baricco to me is a literary genius. An artist like very few others. There is nothing about this book that I don't utterly love. My life is richer for having read the Ocean Sea. I only wish the Almayer Inn would exist in real life, I could use it sometimes :)

One star for the cover
The book is truly wonderful in many ways: all those meaningful ambiguities, pretentiousness, ghost-like characters that have no life in them and evoke no love or sympathy. The narrative is so spooky (but don't think this is a good example of a cool sur-real deal) so I couldn't just think of the plot as possibly ever happened under any circumstances or anywhere. I mean, the trick with fiction writings is to intertwine in the narrative the reality with the surreal, so that a reader can relate to it and believe that the events described have indeed took place (Da Vinci Code - heh?!). Now, dress this kind of morass in XXXLong sentences and the "exotic language" and you'd want to be this one your last book ever.

Wow!
Absolutely incredible. It is rare that I'll give a book 5 stars. Baricco can write! And not only can he write, but he has an amazing gift with human insight and rendering the most delicate of human reality with pure poetry. I'm actually stunned by this book. My only regret is not being able to read it in Italian. I say again, WOW!