Ocean Sea

From the author of the international bestseller Silk ("Vividly erotic" -- Los Angeles Times; "A heartbreaking love story . . . a literary gem of bewitching power" -- The Sunday Times [London]), comes a haunting, suspenseful tale of love and vengeance.

A handful of disparate lives converge at a remote seaside inn: a lovelorn professor, a renowned painter, an inscrutable seductress. And a beautiful young girl, fatally ill, brought to the sea by a desperate father's last hope. An intricate web of destinies and associations begins to reveal itself, 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. Adams may furnish the key to the girl's salvation, but only the fulfillment of his obsessive secret purpose -- to answer murder with murder -- can conclude the journey that has brought him from the ends of the earth. At once playful and profoundly serious, Alessandro Baricco's new novel surges with the hypnotic power of the ocean sea. "Fascinating...The remarkable Baricco is artistic kin to his compatriot Roberto Calasso. Both are originals...Both write with a charm."

--Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times

"Ocean Sea blew me away. It's half dream, half lyric...I know somebody who learned Italian so he could read Dante in the original. I would do the same for Baricco."

--Anthony Brandt, Men's Journal

"Lives intersect amorously, comically, and murderously...in this lusciously mystical novel...a strangely engaging book."

--Richard Bernstein, New York Times

"Totally original and hypnotically readable...Both breathlessly funny and terribly sad."

--Nancy Pearl, Booklist

"Alessandro Baricco is a novelist who weaves words into a fabric as delicate as Venetian lace. His approach to prose is musical, sensitive to the melody of a sentence and the rhythm of a paragraph."

--Thomas Simpson, Chicago Tribune Alessandro Baricco was born in Turin in 1958. His novels have won many literary prizes, including the Prix Medicis in France, and the Campiello, Viareggio, and Palazzo del Bosco prizes in Italy. He has also written works in the field of musicology. He is highly regarded in Italy as a television commentator on opera and literature. Sand as far as the eye can see, between the last hills and the sea -- the sea -- in the cold air of an afternoon almost past, and blessed by the wind that always blows from the north.

        The beach. And the sea.

        It could be perfection -- an image for divine eyes -- a world that happens, that's all, the mute existence of land and water, a work perfectly accomplished, truth --truth  -- but once again it is the redeeming grain of a man that jams the mechanism of that paradise, a bagatelle capable on its own of suspending all that great apparatus of inexorable truth, a mere nothing, but one planted in the sand, an imperceptible tear in the surface of that sacred icon, a minuscule exception come to rest on the perfection of that boundless beach. To see him from afar he would be no more than a black dot: amid nothingness, the nothing of a man and a painter's easel. The easel is anchored by slender cords to four stones placed on the sand. It sways imperceptibly in the wind that always blows from the north. The man is wearing waders and a large fisherman's jacket. He is standing, facing the sea, twirling a slim paintbrush between his fingers. On the easel, a canvas.

        He is like a sentinel -- this you must realize -- standing there to defend that part of the world from the silent invasion of perfection, a small crack that fragments that spectacular stage set of being. As it is always like this, you need only the glimmer of a man to wound the repose of that which would otherwise be a split second away from becoming truth but instead immediately becomes suspense and doubt once more, because of the simple and infinite power of that man who is a slit, a chink, a small doorway through