Ocean Sea by Alastair McEwen - Like a rich chocolate cake

In Alessandro Bariccos celebrated debut, it was silk that exerted a fatal attraction. This time its 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. Theyre soon joined by the beautiful young daughter of a local aristocrat, whos 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--theres the same pleasure in elegant riddles and rococo storytelling. Here and there the narrative of Ocean Sea vanishes down a dead end, and the authors weakness for typographical trickery doesnt help. Still, Bariccos novel remains a refreshing dunk in what Christina Stead called the ocean of story--and a brainy exploration of the littoral truth. --Bob Brandeis

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 :)

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