Vintage International
4 total works
Alessandro Baricco re-creates the siege of Troy through the voices of 21 Homeric characters. Sacrificing none of Homer's panoramic scope, Baricco forgoes Homer's detachment and admits us to realms of subjective experience his predecessor never explored. From the return of Chryseis to the burial of Hector, we see through human eyes and feel with human hearts the unforgettable events first recounted more than 3,000 years ago, events arranged not by the whims of the gods in this instance but by the dictates of human nature. With Andromache, Patroclus, Priam, and the rest, we are privy to the ghastly confusion of battle, the clamour of the princely councils, the intimacies of the bedchamber until finally only a blind poet is left to recount secondhand the awful fall of Ilium. Imbuing the stuff of legend with a startlingly new relevancy and humanity, Baricco gives us The Iliad as we have never known it. His transformative achievement is certain to delight and fascinate all the readers of Homer's indispensable classic.
'CITY is an important title for me, because it expresses what this book has always been in my head. A city. No particular city. An impression of a city rather. Its skeleton. I thought of the stories I had in mind as if they were neighbourhoods. And I imagined characters as if they were streets...The characters - the streets - are many. There is a barber who on Thursdays cuts hair for no charge, there is a giant, and a mute. There is a boy called Gould, and a girl called Shatzy Shell. There are professors, people who play football, a black kid who plays basketball and never fails to score, and there's also a general.' Alessandro Baricco
Without Blood starts with a terrible act of violence - a vendetta to kill a man and his family. Only the daughter, Nina, survives. She is four. And she survives because of an extraordinary act of mercy. In the second section of the novel Nina is an old woman. She meets again her childhood saviour and the reunion brings about all sorts of reappraisals of their respective lives and what took place on that fateful night over half a century earlier. Highly visual and unforgettably sad, Without Blood is a haunting book about longing, memory and forgiveness. Ann Goldstein's superb translation captures Baricco's effortless prose style and gives people in Britain the opportunity to experience this gem of a novel that has delighted hundreds of thousands of readers across Europe.
The year is 1861. Hervé Joncour is a French merchant of silkworms, who combs the known world for their gemlike eggs. Then circumstances compel him to travel farther, beyond the edge of the known, to a country legendary for the quality of its silk and its hostility to foreigners: Japan.There Joncour meets a woman. They do not touch; they do not even speak. And he cannot read the note she sends him until he has returned to his own country. But in the moment he does, Joncour is possessed.