Silk (novel)

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Hand-woven silk from Thailand

Silk ( Italian Seta ) is a novel by the Italian writer Alessandro Baricco published in 1996. The slim book became an international bestseller and in 2007 by François Girard filmed . The German translation from 1997 made Baricco known in the German-speaking world.

The background of the novel is the silk production in the middle of the 19th century in southern France. The protagonist, an importer of silkworms , falls in love with a young Japanese woman on his annual trips to Japan, without love finding fulfillment beyond the stage of desire and longing. The minimalist, omitted style of the novel has often been compared to the lightness and transparency of silk .

content

When the entrepreneur Baldabiou moved to Lavilledieu in the south of France in the mid-19th century, he changed the life of the tranquil village. Its settlement of several silk mills leads to prosperity and makes the place grow into a center of the European manufacture of silk . He also tears the young Hervé Joncour, the mayor's son, who drifts through life without impulses, out of his military career. From now on, Joncour's task will be an adventurous annual trip to Africa in order to secure the existence of the silkworms in the village by delivering new eggs .

Japanese silk mill in Tomioka during the Meiji period

When the nosema plague decimated the silkworms in Europe and Africa in 1861 to such an extent that silk production in Lavilledieu was on the brink of ruin, Baldabiou sent Joncour to Japan to get uninfected silkworms from the isolated island state . After a three month trip, Joncour arrives in Japan. In the mountains near the city of Shirakawa he meets Hara Kei, a provincial prince who, after lengthy negotiations, sells him high quality caterpillars. At his side is a woman with the face of a young girl and European-cut eyes. Eye contact is enough and Joncour, although happily married to his wife Hélène, has fallen in love with the young Japanese woman.

In the following years Joncour repeated the lucrative journey for him and the village's silk industry. Every time he meets Hara Kei, every time the young woman is at his side. There is nothing more than eye contact, the secret handing over of small keepsakes and a one-off, silent caress during a ritual bath. In 1865 the situation in Japan changed. During the Bakumatsu period , internal political tensions erupted in uprisings and xenophobic attacks. Despite cheap alternatives for the purchase of silkworms, Baldabiou enables Joncour to travel to Japan again. When it reaches Hara Keis village, it is destroyed and abandoned. It took days for Joncour to find the residents in a refugee caravan, but he did not manage to see the young woman again. Hara Kei threatens him with death, sends him away and forbids him to come back. Only after his return to Yokohama does Joncour take care of replacement caterpillars. When it arrived late in France, the larvae had already hatched and died.

By investing all his fortune in the construction of a park, Hervé Joncour succeeds in absorbing the loss of annual silk production for the residents of Lavilledieu, but he himself falls into a deep depression. After six months in which he closed himself off from the world, he received a letter in Japanese script, apparently sent to Europe by the young Japanese woman. It is both an erotic love letter and a wistful farewell letter and enables Joncour to internally close his travel experiences. From now on he leads a satisfied and needless life at the side of his wife Hélène. It was only when she died in 1875 that Joncour discovered that the Japanese love letter was actually from Hélène.

shape

In the German translation, silk comprises almost 16,000 words; the book editions are between 118 and 153 pages, depending on the font size. Despite the small size, the prose text is classified as a novel by the publisher . Gerhild Fuchs saw silk in her monograph on Baricco's works more like a novella . In terms of style, she felt reminded of Minimal Art and Minimal Music . In her study, Silvia Contarini drew a comparison with the brevity of Japanese haikus . The minimalism of silk deviates from Baricco's usual narrative attitude, which is often expansive and interspersed with style experiments. A typical characteristic of Baricco can also be found in silk : the musicality of the style, which can be seen in the refrain-like repetition of long and detailed passages.

The novel is divided into 65 short chapters with a length of half to two pages, which gives it a fragmentary character. The short, simple main clauses are ordered paratactically . The plot remains sketchy too. There are always big leaps in time, causality and contexts of meaning of the events remain incomplete, the motivations and the emotional world of the characters involved are concealed. The focus of the novel is the unsaid, the blanks must be filled in by the reader. The stylistic device of the omission finds its visual equivalent in the numerous empty areas of the pages that are a consequence of the short chapters.

interpretation

characters

Hervé Joncour is not a typical protagonist of Baricco. He has none of the extraordinaryness and unconventionality of the usual staff in Baricco's novels, the most striking characteristic being his mediocrity. Joncour's life plan is determined by others, first by his father, then by Baldabiou, who has just arrived. His actions are substitute acts , which is particularly evident in the love affair with the Japanese girl. Instead of a kiss, they both drink from the same teacup, and he performs the act of love with a representative she has chosen. Joncour does not act actively, but takes on a passive observer role in his existence. Even after the late realization that he had misunderstood his wife Hélène all his life, he spends the last few years in monotony: "He spent the rest of his time on a series of habits that successfully saved him from being unhappy."

Baricco did not refine Joncour or the rest of the staff in the novel. Joncour's aimlessness, for example, is not described, explained or even problematized in detail. Hélène and Baldabiou, too, remain mere foils of modesty, compassion and courage on the one hand, and of visions, energy and assertiveness on the other. The latter also brings in the subject of the temptation of fate through his billiard games, in which the right against the left hand, as Baldabiou makes his further life dependent on the outcome of the games and ends up leaving as suddenly as he once appeared in the village . Of the Japanese characters, Hara Kei, the mysterious provincial despot, embodies the alien and the exotic, both mythical and threatening. His young concubine , on the other hand, bridges the gap from the strange to the familiar with the emphatically European shape of her eyes, combining exoticism and intimacy.

The lightness and the nothing

The eponymous silk already gives the story its program. Like the material, the text is also characterized by great lightness and transparency for Fuchs, a context that many reviews of the novel have emphasized. The central theme of desire, the object of which turns out to be neither tangible nor visible, remains on the level of a phantasmagoria . There is a noticeable lack of dialogue between the characters. Hervé Joncour and his wife Hélène hardly exchange a word throughout the entire novel. There is also a lack of language in Joncour's relationship with the young Japanese woman, albeit due to external circumstances, which is compensated for by communication through looks, gestures and actions.

The novel repeatedly refers to nothing . It is said about Hara Kei that he moves through a vacuum, and the first eye contact between Joncour and the girl takes place in complete silence, "that what happened unexpectedly and was nonetheless nothing, seemed like an outrage." last arrival in Japan, Joncour sees “nothing in front of him. Suddenly he saw what he had thought to be invisible. The end of the world. ”In Baricco's novel, the disappearance of the subject follows from the inability to represent reality. The fabulous remains, the style takes center stage in a "book about nothing, where style is everything."

Regarding Flaubert

Salammbô , lithograph by Alfons Mucha , 1896

Baricco in silk makes specific references to Gustave Flaubert's novel Salammbô several times . While the mention of its origin primarily locates the events in 1861, according to Gerhild Fuchs, the entire text of silk can actually be understood as postmodern pastiche on Flaubert's novel, as a hypertext and an imitation of his style. The similarities in content range from the motif of exoticism , a fascination with the foreign that grips both the protagonist and the reader, the myth that revolves around Flaubert's Carthage as well as Baricco's isolated Japan, to the taboo and the threat that both cases pose surround the desired woman. Joncour's mediocrity is reminiscent of another work by Flaubert, Frédéric Moreau, the main character from L'Éducation sentimentale .

Stylistically, the minimalist narrative form, which is unusual for Baricco, takes up the principles of Flaubert, who wanted to express the senselessness of world events with the arbitrariness of the sequence of actions. But in contrast to Flaubert, Baricco does not convey a critical or pessimistic worldview. Unlike in Madame Bovary , for example , he is not interested in exposing an illusion through sobering reality. The social injustices of the 19th century are left out, as is the dreary everyday life in a provincial town. The ideal world in which the story takes place remains largely unbroken. In this reduction to a limited, purely fictional world, Baricco turns out to be a postmodernist who does not strive for a complex image of reality, but derives metaphors and parabolic statements about human existence as such, such as the inexpressibility and insatiability of longings.

reception

Seta had been translated into 32 languages ​​by 2008 and is an international bestseller . Karin Krieger's translation was the first German-language publication of Baricco's works in 1997. It made the author known in the German-speaking world. In the year of publication, the seventh edition of the Piper Verlag was reprinted and over 100,000 copies were sold.

Elke Heidenreich called the novel “light as a silk scarf”, a comparison made by the radio station NDR 1 : “As delicate as a silk scarf, as romantic as a sunrise in early summer, as charming as the smile of a Japanese lady - like that is this love story by Alessandro Baricco. ”The women's magazine Brigitte judged:“ In this wonderfully light and at the same time melancholy love story every word is correct, every gesture has meaning and meaning. ”Martina Gollhardt concluded in KulturSpiegel:“ The straightforward story of a 'fake love affair 'presents itself as strict, very erotic calligraphy - with pleasure to decipher. "

Marina Neubert saw in the novel "a literary masterpiece, composed like a short piece of music with an extraordinarily poetic density, in which every note is chosen with care and every decoration is left out". However, ten years after the German first edition, she saw the great success of the book as being due to the fact that it had largely been misunderstood as the story of Hervé Joncour's unrequited love, although "Baricco himself distanced himself from Joncour's love addiction, in some places even mockingly". Only at the end did Baricco counter Joncour's phrase-like yearning with true love, that of his wife Hélène.

The novel was read in 1997 by Christian Brückner as an audio book . In 2003, Jobst Christian Oetzmann implemented the template as a radio play. The speakers included Jeanette Hain , Martin Feifel and Nikolaus Paryla . In 2007 François Girard filmed silk in an international co-production. The main roles were played by Keira Knightley , Michael Pitt , Alfred Molina and Kōji Yakusho .

Legal dispute over German translation

Translator Karin Krieger's request for a subsequent share in the success of the German-language edition of silk led to a dispute between Krieger and Piper Verlag. After the latter had first admitted a share, he subsequently announced that he would take Krieger's translations of Baricco's books off the market and commission new translations, including for the planned paperback edition of Silk . There was a legal dispute that led to the Federal Court of Justice . In 2004, he decided that Piper Verlag had to offer new editions of the translations that had already been published, and his judgment strengthened the translators' rights. The later editions and licensed editions of silk also followed Karin Krieger's original translation.

literature

Text output

Secondary literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gerhild Fuchs: Alessandro Bariccos Variations of Postmodernism , p. 19.
  2. ↑ Gerhild Fuchs: Alessandro Baricco's Variations of Postmodernism , p. 11.
  3. ↑ Silivia Contarini: Corrente e controcorrente . In: Narrativa 12 (1997), p. 45. After Gerhild Fuchs: Alessandro Bariccos Variationen der Postmoderne , p. 51.
  4. ↑ See section: Gerhild Fuchs: Alessandro Bariccos Variationen der Postmoderne , pp. 51–53.
  5. ↑ Alessandro Baricco: Silk , pp. 131–132.
  6. ↑ See the section: Gerhild Fuchs: Alessandro Bariccos Variationen der Postmoderne , pp. 50, 53–55, 88.
  7. ↑ Alessandro Baricco: Silk , p. 30.
  8. ↑ Alessandro Baricco: Silk , p. 89.
  9. ↑ See section: Gerhild Fuchs: Alessandro Bariccos Variationen der Postmoderne , pp. 53, 56–59
  10. ↑ See section: Gerhild Fuchs: Alessandro Bariccos Variationen der Postmoderne , pp. 48–60.
  11. ↑ Maike Albath : pioneers of speed . In: Deutschlandradio Kultur from February 29, 2008.
  12. ↑ Short biography on Alessandro Baricco for the international literature festival berlin .
  13. ↑ a b Press Release No. 72/2004 of the Federal Court of Justice of June 18, 2004.
  14. ^ Andreas Fink: Magico Alessandro . In: Focus from May 18, 1998.
  15. ^ Seta at Reclam-Verlag .
  16. ↑ a b silk  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.dtv.de   at the German paperback publishing house .
  17. ↑ New Books . In: KulturSpiegel of June 23, 1997.
  18. ↑ Marina Neubert: Search for a mysterious Japanese woman . In: Berliner Morgenpost dated July 23, 2007. Reprint ( memento of the original dated March 4, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the homepage of Marina Neubert. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.marinaneubert.de
  19. ↑ Silk  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.jobst-oetzmann.de   on the website of Jobst Christian Oetzmann .
  20. ↑ To the entire section: Documentation on the Piper case ( Memento of the original from July 13, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.literaturuebersetzer.de archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the website of the Association of German Language Translators .