Canons
2 total works
France, 1861. When an epidemic threatens to wipe out the silk trade in France, Herve Joncour, a young silk breeder, has to travel overland to distant Japan, out of bounds to foreigners, to smuggle out healthy silkworms. In the course of his secret negotiations with the local baron, Joncour's attention is arrested by the man's concubine, a girl who does not have oriental eyes. Although they are unable to exchange so much as a word, love blossoms between them, a love that is conveyed in a number of recondite messages. How their secret affair develops is told in this remarkable love story. As haunting as a strain of passionate music, Silk is an enchantment, an exquisite narrative and a stylistic tour de force.
At a remote place where the land meets the sea, a handful of disparate lives converge. Professor Bartleboom writes love letters to a woman he has yet to meet; Elisewin, a young girl, fatally ill, hopes to be cured by the sea; a renowned artist spends his days painting the sea with the sea; a beautiful woman who has betrayed her husband has been exiled. An intricate web of destinies and associations begins to form, but it is not until the arrival of a mysterious sailor called Adams that the truth in all its dreamlike beauty and cruelty becomes clear.