Ocean Sea [Paperback]

Alessandro Baricco (Author), Alastair McEwen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 27, 2000

"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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (June 27, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375703950
• ISBN-13: 978-0375703959
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #82,482 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars SAVAGE BEAUTY, April 28, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Ocean Sea (Hardcover)

Alessandro Baricco's Ocean Sea is a lyrically beautiful, but cruel, allegory of the secret hopes, dreams, fears, quests and horrors that drive us all and often, against our wishes, consume our lives. And, no matter how hard we deny it, there comes a time in every person's life when he or she must confront his deepest, darkest secrets, a time when they can no longer be suppressed. For it is only when we confront our fears and our obsessions, our hopes and our dreams, and yes, even our horrors, that they lose their power over us and we are finally restored to wholeness. Alessandro Baricco has assembled a cast of broken, disparate characters, each seeking the restorative powers of the ocean sea, that elusive place where fantasy meets reality, where love and horror become inexorably woven into the fabric of life. Baricco's prose is certainly not the flowery, overwrought "purple prose" of Anne Rice or Michael Ondaatje. Instead, it evokes the lyrical skeletalness of Debussy--beautiful and difficult, yet barely there, like the edge of the sea, itself. Savigny's narrative, in Book II, is one of the finest examples of the power and beauty of language I have ever encountered. If I have any criticism of Ocean Sea, it is the fact that the ultimate fate of Professor Bartleboom did not seem in character with the savage beauty evoked in the rest of the book. I almost felt as though I had been dropped inside another story altogether. But allegory is difficult to write and even more difficult to read, and Ocean Sea is no exception. I doubt that anyone alive can absorb this exquisite book's impact in only one reading. Like Silk, another of Baricco's works, Ocean Sea is a masterpiece. A small, but flawless, gem that will astound you and haunt you, but will never, ever let you alone.

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Emotionally honest "realistic" fantasy, June 24, 2000

By 

M. J. Smith (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Ocean Sea (Paperback)

Baricco has written a tremendous story of the truth of our human condition - individuals with a variety of obsessions - revenge, art, science, sensual experience - who are seemingly unrelated come together for the healing of the sea. They come together in a small ocean inn run by fay children. At the center of the book stands a horrofic story of humanity at its worst. . . .

The structure of the book is a difficult one but one Baricco has fashioned into the absolutely correct form for his story. The prose ranges from very lush, descriptive prose to very taciturn conversation, from art catalogue entries to poetic prayers. Occasionally a sentence or two will misfire, but Baricco has exquisite control over his medium.

This book belongs on any must read list.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Really worth reading, February 24, 2000

By 

Laura (Milan, Italy) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ocean Sea (Hardcover)

I think this is probably the best book I have ever read. Actually, I have read everything by Baricco more than once (in Italian, since this is my mother language), but Ocean sea is by far his most impressive work. I mean, it is poetry turned into prose. That's not easy to explain. At the very beginning, the reader seems to be wandering in the middle of nowhere, but then he starts understanding that he's following a hidden path. It's like a puzzle, you never see anything clear until you get to the end, but when you do, it is just as if you had found a treasure. While reading, you are under the spell of something quite strange, something that puts you in touch with yourself, with your life somehow. The feeling is the one of being in the middle of a painting by Dalì or Magritte: something seeming supernatural, superreal, but that is in fact incredibly true and near. It touches you so deep within that it takes you to a higher level, where everything gets meaningful and where one's rediscovers his sensitivity. Baricco's style is perfect, too. The fact is that he's really good at telling stories, and I am sorry for those who couldn't listen to him live on TV or in theatres. As for the book anyway, it would be a pity to miss it. Most people think it has been written after Silk (a masterpiece, too, but completely different). I just wanted to point out this is untrue, since he wrote it later. But worth reading as well.