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March 31,
'Ocean Sea': A Flawed Gem of a Novel
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
OCEAN SEA By Alessandro Baricco. Knopf, $ |
he Almayer Inn, located on some timeless and fabled European shore, is, like Joseph Roth's earlier Hotel Savoy, a place for the ingathering of comically or poignantly eccentric characters.
The first one of these in Alessandro Baricco's lusciously mystical new novel, "Ocean Sea," is a painter named Plasson who uses sea water to paint the sea, creating all-white canvases. A woman named Ann Deveria, wrapped in purple and thinking of her husband and her lover, roams the shore. Soon Elisewin, a fragile teen-age princess with "a most beautiful voice -- velvet" who "slipped through the air, so that you could not take your eyes off her," is sent to the hotel by her doting father to cure her congenital frailty.
Others are present, including Ismael Adelante Ismael Prof.
Ocean sea book alessandro baricco biography Ocean Sea (Italian: Oceano mare) is a novel by the Italian writer Alessandro Baricco. Its narrative revolves around the lives of a group of people gathered at a remote seaside hotel. The novel won the Viareggio Prize. [1].Bartleboom, a daft scientist who writes daily love letters to the woman he hopes one day to meet. The most enigmatic and darkest of the guests is a former seaman named Adams, who quietly nurses a sense of vengeance. And the whole is presided over by a core of precocious children, who are like the cherubs of a Renaissance painting: One of them furnishes dreams to the hotel's quaint inhabitants, another stares from a window ledge at the sea.
These lives, and several others, are going to intersect, amorously, comically, and murderously, as "Ocean Sea" unfolds in its poetically elliptical way.
Baricco is a literary cubist, a stylist who looks simultaneously at the several sides of things. He switches from one rhetorical mode to another, from a kind of symbolist poetry to grand adventure narrative to picaresque comedy, and the novel is masterfully reincarnated from Italian to English by the translator, Alastair McEwen.
"The truth is that it's the music that's hard, it's the music that's hard to find, to say things, there so close to each other, the music and the gestures, to dissolve the suffering, when there is absolutely nothing to be done anymore, the right music so that it may be a dance, in some way, and not a wrench, that going off, that slipping away, toward life and away from life, strange pendulum of the soul " and so on for another dozen or so phrases.
This style of writing can be precious, artificial, a kind of verbal craftsmanship for craftsmanship's sake, but generally I read "Ocean Sea" transfixed by Baricco's linguistic originality, the boisterousness of his characters, and the skill with which he weaves the threads of a seemingly disjointed plot into a single narrative strand.
The pleasure of discovering the surprising qualities in this Italian writer, whose only previous novel was the erotic love story "Silk," far outweighs the occasional annoyance of his lapses into mystico mannerism.
Ocean sea book alessandro baricco biography death
Ocean Sea (Italian: Oceano mare) is a novel by the Italian writer Alessandro Baricco. Its narrative revolves around the lives of a group of people gathered at a remote seaside hotel. The novel won the Viareggio Prize. [1]."Ocean Sea" is a flawed gem of a novel, an accident-prone beauty that took a great deal of talent and imagination to devise.
The sea provides a constant thematic presence, and there are shades of "Moby-Dick" here: the sea as a void, a blank slate, on which men and women impose deep meaning.
For some of the guests at the Almayer Inn, it is a cure for everything. Ann Deveria's cuckolded husband has sent her here because he thinks that "the sea air may cool the passions." Professor Bartleboom studies it as part of his vast project, the compilation of an Encyclopedia of the Limits to be Found in Nature, because, after all, the sea ends someplace, though that end point may take years of scientific observation to find.
Adams' history includes a shipwreck off Africa and imprisonment by a local satrap who made him bark like a dog. He bears a strange resemblance, explained as Baricco's story progresses, to a seaman named Thomas whose story is told in what at first seems like an epic diversion from the main thread.
It has to do with a French naval frigate called Alliance that went aground off the coast of Africa.
Alessandro baricco biografia: Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness.
A good portion of its crew was abandoned by the ship's captain and set adrift on a makeshift raft, setting into motion a savage battle for survival in which Thomas and the ship's doctor, Savigny, became deadly rivals.
"This is the story of an abomination," begins Thomas' version of this seaborne nightmare.
"I am writing it in my mind, now, with what strength I have left and with my eyes fixed on that man who shall never have my forgiveness. Death shall read it." Baricco wraps everything up in a final series of chapters, each devoted to one of his guests at the Almayer Inn.
Some of these chapters are among Baricco's more enigmatic.
Ocean sea book alessandro baricco biography wikipedia Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness.Elisewin's in particular is a fairy tale unburdened with motive or plausible explanation. The passages on Bartleboom's burlesque quest for love, in which he delivers a mahogany box full of his prewritten letters to three women, is the book's comic high point."
In these final chapters, various mysteries of identity are cleared up, as we learn who, exactly, are the people we thought we had come to know.
One reads with a bit of a frisson as Baricco shifts from a comic to a tragic mode, from the theme of antic love to that of patiently exacted revenge, with a surprise at the end. But as with the rest of this novel, Baricco's voice remains detached, wry, musical, always vaguely parodic.
"This is a place where you take leave of yourself," Ann Deveria writes in a letter to her lover.
"What you are slips away from you, bit by bit.
Alessandro baricco novecento 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.And you leave it behind you, step by step, on this shore that does not know time and lives only one day, always the same one."
It is among the mysteries of this strangely engaging book that that is not true. In "Ocean Sea" the characters remain very much themselves as they live out a kind of preordained destiny. But then Baricco wants to tantalize us with his cubist conundrums, and in this he succeeds very well.