Silk, Alessandro Baricco, translated by Ann Goldstein

(May 13) What an amazing and powerful little book. It’s only 132 pages, but it packs the kind of wallop you might expect only from long, pretentious sagas or old masters.

And it’s written so sparingly! It’s like living in a haiku for a little while. Even though it’s a translation, the book is nothing but the plainest and most common words in English, so you suspect that in the original Italian it would also be plain, unadorned vocabulary. So it doesn’t feel like you might be missing nuances. Although with this kind of book you probably are.

The story seems completely original when you are in it, but within a few minutes of finishing it, I realized it was another form of “The Beast in the Jungle,” and a story about limerence.

Andrea (from whom I got this recommendation) thought it was like music -- the pacing, the repetitions, the flourishes -- and with this I agree.