Product Description
"Exotic...erotic... Ocean Sea is highly romantic and breathtakingly lyrical."--The New York Times Book Review

With Silk, his first novel to appear in English, Alessandro Baricco immediately proved himself to be a magical storyteller. With Ocean Sea, he has been acclaimed as the successor to Italo Calvino, and a major voice in modern literature.

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. A scientist pens love letters to a woman he has yet to meet. An adulteress searches for relief from her proclivity to fall in love. And a sixteen-year-old girl seeks a cure from a mysterious condition which science has failed to remedy. When these people meet, their fates begin to interact as if by design. Enter a mighty tempest and a ghostly mariner with a thirst for vengeance, and the Inn becomes a place where destiny and desire battle for the upper hand. Playful, provocative, and ultimately profound, Ocean Sea is a novel of striking originality and wisdom.

Amazon.com Review
In Alessandro Baricco's celebrated debut, it was silk that exerted a fatal attraction. This time it's the ocean, whose watery charms cause an entire cast of characters to convene at the isolated Almayer Inn. The guests include a seductress, an eccentric professor, and a painter with a pronounced penchant for metaphysics. They're soon joined by the beautiful young daughter of a local aristocrat, who's been stricken with a mysterious illness. In a sense, however, all these characters are suffering from maladies--psychological, existential, erotic--which makes the Almayer Inn a kind of Magic Mountain with beachfront footage.

The author is a renowned opera critic in his native Italy. Perhaps this accounts for his love of linguistic arias, which can overpower the plot of Ocean Sea. When Baricco gets rolling, of course, his intricately worked prose is a delight. Even the inn itself, situated alone on a promontory, gets the red carpet treatment: "So alone it was there, it seemed a thing forgotten. It was almost as if a procession of inns, of every kind and vintage, had passed by there one day, skirting the coast, when, out of tiredness, one had detached itself from the rest, and, as its travelling companions filed past, it decided to stop on that slight rise, yielding to its own weakness, bowing its head and waiting for the end." At his best, Baricco recalls Italo Calvino--there's the same pleasure in elegant riddles and rococo storytelling. Here and there the narrative of Ocean Sea vanishes down a dead end, and the author's weakness for typographical trickery doesn't help. Still, Baricco's novel remains a refreshing dunk in what Christina Stead called "the ocean of story"--and a brainy exploration of the littoral truth. --Bob Brandeis

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 26 reviews)

Like a rich chocolate cake

Like a rich chocolate cake this book has to be enjoyed in little pieces to fully do it justice. One paragraph, one sentence, one image, at most a chapter at a time! It is so beautiful it literally leaves you breahtless. With just one word or sentence Baricco can create a whole scene, a whole world. It is one of those few books that I keep returning to regularly just to add beauty to my life. There are paragraphs and pages I must have read dozens of times. There is no other book I know that can offer such ethereal, completely honest truth and beauty. It is one of my most priced posessions, something I don't ever want to be without. Baricco to me is a literary genius. An artist like very few others. There is nothing about this book that I don't utterly love. My life is richer for having read the Ocean Sea. I only wish the Almayer Inn would exist in real life, I could use it sometimes :)
March 24, 2008

One star for the cover

The book is truly wonderful in many ways: all those meaningful ambiguities, pretentiousness, ghost-like characters that have no life in them and evoke no love or sympathy. The narrative is so spooky (but don't think this is a good example of a cool sur-real deal) so I couldn't just think of the plot as possibly ever happened under any circumstances or anywhere. I mean, the trick with fiction writings is to intertwine in the narrative the reality with the surreal, so that a reader can relate to it and believe that the events described have indeed took place (Da Vinci Code - heh?!). Now, dress this kind of morass in XXXLong sentences and the "exotic language" and you'd want to be this one your last book ever.
February 11, 2008

Wow!

Absolutely incredible. It is rare that I'll give a book 5 stars. Baricco can write! And not only can he write, but he has an amazing gift with human insight and rendering the most delicate of human reality with pure poetry. I'm actually stunned by this book. My only regret is not being able to read it in Italian. I say again, WOW!
November 27, 2006

A Beautiful Tragedy

This is honestly one of my favorite books ever, if not my absolute favorite. If you like beautiful writting, tragic stories, and interesting charicters this a must read. Even if the beginning frusterates you a bit, stick with this book because its worth it in the end. Let your imagination run wild with the end because everyone I have discussed this book with has a slightly different opinion and that is another reason to love this book.
October 12, 2006

Wonderful.

Lovely, simple, complex, lyrical, sweet, distressing, etc. I've never read anything quite like this small but intrictly crafted tapestry of words. Alessandro Baricco -- do you take on writing students? I would love to write like this.
March 02, 2006

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