ALESSANDRO BARICCO was born in Turin in 1958. He has written four novels (Lands of Glass, Ocean Sea, Silk and City) all of which have been translated into English. He is also the author of two plays, and two collections of essays.
"Although the events he recounts remain cryptic, Baricco's style is lucid, and the appearance-versus-reality mind games he plays with his readers are fascinating."
Two novellas, thematically related by the theme of love...or the lack of love.
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"Both celebration and condemnation of war, this Iliad manages to speak to yet another generation that needs desperately to hear its message."
One of the greatest stories of all time is briskly retold in the award-winning Italian author's fifth novel (Without Blood, 2004, etc.).
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"Baricco sails uneasily between the cheap and deep, albeit sometimes grippingly."
From Italy's prize-winning Baricco (City, 2002; Ocean Sea, 1999, etc.), a thinny-thin little tale that stretches credibility but takes up big imponderables.
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"Reading City is like trying to play a newly marketed game whose rules aren't included in the package."
The fourth novel from the Italian author of Silk (1997) and Ocean Sea (1999) is a manic comedy set in the US, about the process of storytelling, as performed by its two protagonists: a precocious 13-year-old boy improbably called Gould, who recounts a rags-to-riches story of an unlikely boxing champion to two effectively captive listeners, and Gould's paid companion (and eventual surrogate mother), the even more improbably named—and characterized—Shatzy Shell.
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"Silk was remarkable for its haunting clarity; Ocean Sea is a metaphysical-symbolic miasma in which the intrigued reader can only flounder."
The sea is both cradle of life and lodestone as it draws men toward madness—in this frustratingly elusive fiction,Italian musicologist Baricco's second to appear in English (the novella Silk, 1997).
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Silk ($15.00; Oct. 15; 96 pp.; 1-86046-510-X): A fine novella, set in 19th-century France and the Orient, by a celebrated Italian musicologist and writer.
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