Italian novelist Alessandro Baricco is a purveyor of sub-erotic escapism. His bestselling novella Silk was the literary equivalent of Janet Reger underwear. Many were hoodwinked by its swooningly bijou prose and lacy, Japanese setting. Lyrically sensuous, the book was nevertheless pretty vacant.
Ocean Sea, Barrico's second novel, is set in a 19th-century coastal outpost. The author's imagery recalls that of the famously decadent litterateur, D'Annunzio. It is freakishly overripe and purple. A pearl necklace is a "rosary of desire", while the bends in a river are "a lullaby of the soul". Smelling salts may be required; awash with rustling silks and twilight amours, this novel is mostly heady nonsense.
Slowly a plot emerges from the treacle prose. At the Almayer Inn (an archly Conradian name) a variety of eccentrics meet for the first time. Each has a peculiar past to hide. Madame Deveria is an adulterous wife banished to the ocean by her irate husband. The 16-year-old Elisewin has a mysterious wasting disease.
Professor Bartleboom is shamelessly modelled on Italo Calvino's last great creation, Mr Palomar. While Palomar settles to a life of cloistered seclusion and the lucid pleasures of abstract thought, so Baricco's Bartleboom researches a crackpot scientific tome - An Encyclopaedia of Limits - to find the point where the sea ends.
However, Calvino wrote wickedly incisive fables; Baricco can muster only a humourless, storybook romance. Ocean Sea is a salmagundi of genres from Conradian high-sea tales to opera librettos. A battery of modernist fripperies - bits of half-baked free verse, gobbets of interior monologue - break up the narrative gratuitously.
Baricco's irritating stylistic mishmash has a history. In the late 1970s the author was part of a toweringly pretentious literary circle in Turin which called for a new fiction of pure and undiluted fantasy.
Thus Ocean Sea absorbs the far-out shipboard dramas of Italy's downmarket Joseph Conrad, Emilio Salgari. Indeed, a shipwrecked sailor here named Adams (after the sole survivor of the Bounty mutineers, John Adams?) is pure, jewel-encrusted Salgari.
Eventually the disparate lives at the Almayer Inn all interlock, but Ocean Sea fails to hold the reader's attention. Conceivably Baricco is actually an ironical pasticheur - but I don't think so. This is his idea of literature.
As one Italian critic loftily observed: "Alessandro Baricco is a good writer for the undiscerning."
