What is Alessandro Baricco's Silk about?

Silk is the book people press into your hands saying "it'll take you an hour". They are not exaggerating by much. The first Italian edition, published by Rizzoli in 1996, ran to about a hundred pages, and a lot of those pages are mostly white space. It has since been translated widely, adapted for the stage, and filmed in 2007.

The story

Hervé Joncour lives in a small French town whose prosperity depends on silk. When the silkworm eggs the town relies on fail, Joncour sets off to find healthy ones somewhere the trouble has not reached: Japan, at a time when the country barely admits outsiders. The journey is long, the trade is half legal, and every voyage is a gamble.

In Japan he deals with a powerful local man, Hara Kei, and in his household glimpses a young woman. They share no language. What passes between them is a look, a gesture, a note. Joncour returns home to his wife, Hélène, and to his ordinary life, and then goes back, and back again, while Japan itself grows more turbulent and the journeys more dangerous.

That is almost all you need to know before reading. The pleasure of the book is in how little happens on the surface and how much moves underneath, so we will leave the rest to Baricco.

The style

Short, short, short. There are 65 chapters, most of them barely a page, set on half-empty pages.

Repetition as rhythm. Whole paragraphs come back, like refrains in a song, and journeys across half the world are folded into a sentence or two. The effect is closer to music than to a travel story.

Restraint. Baricco leaves out what most novelists would put in: explanations, inner monologue, back story. The gaps are where the emotion sits.

It reads a little like a fable or a prose poem. Some readers adore that and find it haunting; a few find it too polished, like a beautiful object behind glass. Both reactions are fair, and with a book this short, finding out which camp you are in costs one evening.

Why it is a one-evening read

Partly length, obviously. But it is also built to be read in one sitting: the repetitions only work if you hear them close together, and the ending lands hardest when the opening is still fresh in your mind. Read it over several commutes and you lose half the music.

So pick a quiet evening, a comfortable chair and perhaps a glass of something. Put the phone in another room. You will be done before bedtime and thinking about it the next morning.

If you like the feeling of finishing a complete book in a sitting, our list of short novels you can read in a weekend has more.