Reading this book, it comes as no surprise to learn that the Italian
author is a musicologist as well as an accredited novelist. To describe the
tone of this book as lyrical is to employ a hackneyed phrase, but it is
difficult to find a more appropriate expression. The novel is apparently
set in the nineteenth century and concerns a collection of bourgeois
characters residing at a seaboard hotel, the Almayer Inn. Each hopes
that the proximity of the ocean will help them resolve a personal problem or
ambition. Naturally, their very singular objectives intrude upon each
other with curious and fantastic results. In following these developments, the
reader has to work hard to keep up with Baricco’s train of thought, but
thankfully the prose structure is lucid enough to make the text easy on
the eye. There are some awkward sentences (‘An uncontrollable chaos was what
crackled away below his silence and his immobility’) occasionally
married to an irritating penchant for repeating words and phrases for colloquial
effect. But fortunately these are outweighed by some very effective
passages that are both economical and evocative: ‘In the Tamal
Archipelago every evening a fog would come up that devoured the ships and restored
them at dawn completely covered in snow.’ The sea itself is a powerful
metaphor expressing unbounded, irrational nature challenging human comprehension
and aspirations. Baricco’s appreciation of this image is strikingly
reminiscent of the same in Stanislaw Lem’s sci-fi classic Solaris. But the choicest
prose is revealed in the story of the shipwreck in which a group of
passengers and crew descend into murder and cannibalism. This section is
enough to give anyone the feeling of mal de mer. Not that Baricco is all
deadly seriousness. The chapter devoted to the inventory of Plasson’s
paintings demonstrates a subtle humour whilst the recounting of
Bartleboom’s unsuccessful pursuit of a pair of twins, one of whom he
wishes to marry (he knows not which) is a masterpiece of comic prose. Alastair
McEwan deserves particular credit for reproducing such remarkable
passages in such eloquent English. Altogether an intelligent and dazzling piece
of work.
