No Exit

A woman comes to the seaside, sent by her husband to be cured of adultery. A neurasthenic girl comes in search of vigor. A sailor comes to avenge an old crime. A philosopher comes to chart the sea’s highwater limits. An artist, weary of painting society portraits, seeks a subject that is pure, disembodied and eternal. They all put up at a mysteriously evanescent inn run by a band of children.

These are some of the emblematic figures in “Ocean Sea,” a fascinating though chaotic fiction by the Italian writer Alessandro Baricco. There is a landlocked admiral as well: a hieratic figure whose task is to sift all that is taking place in the sea--passages, cargoes, wrecks, drownings, storms, monsters, islands surging up or sinking--and to decide on behalf of an unnamed authority what can be known and what must be concealed.

Baricco is the author of “Silk,” a novel that was brief in form and marvelously expansive in effect. Its story line--the repeated journeys to early 19th century Japan by a French silk manufacturer--was relatively terse and compact, a narrative mooring for the variations, implications and magical alternatives that sprang from it. Writing a kind of universal dream, Baricco was careful to keep the particular dreamer in view until the end, when dreamer and dream merge.

“Ocean,” more ambitious but also more effortful and diffuse, dispenses with an anchoring narrative. The half-dozen characters haunt rather than enact their half-dozen stories. They swirl, intertwine, separate and accumulate energy, which dissipates at the point of discharge. They are assorted musical themes that flow into a resolving cadence and--frustratingly but sometimes with startling grace--flow out of it.

Baricco’s theme shines, nonetheless. The sea, shape-changing and constant, stands for what might be thought of as God or the order of the universe: true, unknowable, perfect and, though continually sought after by humans, essentially indifferent to their vital purposes. Baricco poses truth against life--Shelley’s white eternity against the temporal, many-colored dome that gloriously stains it.

The opening scene sets it out: a cold expanse of North Sea beach and water and one tiny person. “A work perfectly accomplished, truth--TRUTH--but once again it is the redeeming grain of a man that jams the mechanism of that paradise. . . . From afar he would be no more than a black dot: amid nothingness, the nothing of a man and a painter’s easel.” Baricco continues:

“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 which return a flood of stories . . . an infinite gash, a marvelous wound, a path made of thousands of steps where nothing can be true anymore but everything WILL BE. . . .”

The black dot is Plasson, a blot on “perfection” while absurdly seeking it. Disdaining his portraitist success--painting the natural and human world, he says, is a form of pornography--he is after the ineffable. Pigment itself is too gross; to paint the sea he uses sea water. The result is canvas after canvas, all of them blank. His real futility, though, lies elsewhere.

Art requires a beginning; the sea has none. Painting faces, Plasson would start with the eyes, but where are the sea’s eyes? “Ships,” suggests a child, one of those who run the seaside inn and inhabit the story like the attending putti in a Renaissance canvas. Ships--assorted, temporal, frail and loaded with particular purposes--are the only human access to the sea’s sublimity. Yet at best they will only traverse it, at worst sink in it.

Counterpart to the baffled Plasson, seeker of a beginning to the sea, is Professor Bartleboom, who takes measurements to find where it ends. A comic but sympathetic ditherer--each night he writes a love letter and deposits it in a box to present to the woman he hopes someday to find and fall in love with--he is working on an Encyclopedia of Limits. Limits, endings, are what give the world its beauty, he argues: Take sunsets.

Another guest at the inn is Ana, who married her husband because he had kind eyes. Passion she discovered only afterward and elsewhere: Seaside exile is her punishment. Neither honor, nor duty, nor abstract ideas are an adequate guide for living, she tells a fellow guest. Only desire is, and it must be seized on early or it will destroy you.

Her listener is Elisewin, whose nobleman father reluctantly sent her to the seaside on doctor’s advice as the only cure for adolescent apathy. Elisewin follows Ana’s prescription: not the eternal sea but a single night of lusty sex that turns her into an assured and vital woman.

Her partner is Thomas, a sailor who was all but destroyed at sea. His ordeal was hellish, but it was humanity that inflicted it. The central portion of “Ocean” consists of two accounts of a ship sunk through captain’s error and of men marooned for weeks on a raft and succumbing to thirst, hunger, dementia and cannibalism.

One account is that of a lieutenant who relates the experience simply as gruesome nightmare. Thomas tells the other story. Each night the lieutenant and a few followers systematically murdered their fellow castaways so as to stretch the supplies. One of the victims was Thomas’ wife. He has come to the inn to exact a revenge whose course becomes clear only at the book’s end.

For the raft sections, Baricco forsakes the sinuous playfulness of allegory for two versions of Expressionist horror. Each is powerful and dismaying; the author’s skill extends to making them different. The first is voiced with the near-insane hysteria of a sophisticated narrator blocking out his villainy; the other is told with an unlettered victim’s terrible directness.

“Ocean Sea” contains much more than can be described here. There is the elusive admiral, whose relation to the sea-as-universal is parallel to that of Elisewin’s chaplain (an endearing figure at work on a book of 9,000 eccentric prayers) with God. Each is a variety of priest; each is a saintly if futile mediator between the eternal and the human.

There are dozens of exchanges among the inn guests, ranging from the comic to the captivating to the puzzling. There is the violent melodrama of Thomas’ revenge. And there is a seventh guest who emerges only at the end and sums up Baricco’s theme: the futility of human efforts to link life with belief in some overarching reality. Perhaps it was possible once; nowadays it is not.

The postmodern condition thus makes its entry, though the author refuses its irony (he is more of a mourner) as he--the seventh guest, of course--steps out of his room at the inn. The inn is the book itself, a paper lodging for the writer’s characters, speculations and melancholy jokes. Obligingly, it disintegrates and flies off in the last sentence.

The remarkable Baricco is artistic kin to his compatriot, Roberto Calasso. Both are originals; both weave patterns of myth and human story and the airy and earthy connections between them. Both write with a charm that is the opposite of ease or condescension; on the contrary, it attends a far and astonishing exploration.

This is certainly true of “Ocean”; it needs restraining, though, and more of a center. Too much is prone, almost in mid-sentence, to give way to the author’s beaming but inaudible mumble as he makes some private connection we never quite get. To trespass on Baricco’s own patch of imagery: It requires a compact ship to explore his multifarious sea rather than a flotilla of brightly assorted craft that zip about, collide, lose headway and drift; the crew seemingly having taken new billets and embarked elsewhere.