„Although his father had pictured for him a brilliant future in the army, Hervé Joncour had ended up earning his crust in an unusual career which, by a singular piece of irony, was not unconnected with a charming side that bestowed on it a vaguely feminine intonation.
Hervé Joncour bought and sold silkworms for a living.
The year was 1861. Flaubert was writing Salammbô, electric light remained hypothetical, and Abraham Lincoln, beyond the Ocean, was fighting a war of which he was not to see the finish.
Hervé Joncour was thirty-two.
He bought and sold.
Silkworms.”

Let’s start here, where the book starts. And, first of all, I must say one thing: although I’ve read this story in Italian – the original language – I fell in love with its translation too.
Buying and selling silkworms is going to take Hervé Joncourt to what at that time was considered “the end of the world”: Japan. And here’s where the thing starts. A mysterious and beautiful young woman, who does not have oriental eyes, will give birth to a deep feeling within Hervé Jouncour, without saying a word. Hervé will in fact never come to ear the woman’s voice, nor to know her name. And this fact contrasts with another character deeply bound to Hervé: his wife Hélène, a woman with a beautiful voice.
War and fate is what comes next.
In this story, which the same Baricco likes to call a “tale”, and not a “novel”, we just follow a silk thread. Language is simple and fluent, yet often poetic. The author delights us with some occasional shows of his ability in mixing a concise and a more refined style, and by picturing intense images.
The final impression is like having lived a dream: not everything is said, not everything is known, and we don’t really know what the characters think, but we only see how they act. Yet a sweet sensation and a light bitterness is what remains inside us.