A juicy and reverent novel about a sparkling time in history – the Italian Renaissance from the perspective of a determined young female glassmaker on the island of Murano in Venice
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟
Genre: Historical Fiction, Renaissance, Family Drama.
Publisher: Viking
Review in one word: Incandescent
Venice in 1468 was the boom time of Venetian art and culture. As I am fascinated by glass due to its shiny, iridescent and transparent properties, this book about glass artisans during the Italian Renaissance period captivated my attention right from the very beginning!
The City of Water runs by its own clock. Venice and its neighboring islands have always felt frozen in time—and perhaps they are. It is a city built on wooden piles over a lagoon, veined with canals, and its aesthetic and much of its exquisite architecture have remained unchanged for hundreds of years. The boats may have engines now, but time still seems to run at a different speed from the outside world.
One of Venice’s glittering treasures has for centuries been the glass on its attendant island, Murano.
Glass is a peculiar substance, the sand it’s manufactured from magically turning translucent or even transparent when melted. There is some debate about whether glass is a solid or a liquid.
Excerpt from The Glassmaker: A Novel by Tracy Chevalier
The Glassmaker traces the life of Orsola Rosso from little girl to old woman. Along the way Orsola becomes a skilled glass artisan, during a time of great prejudice against women artists. Her larger-than-life Italian family across the generations are the secondary characters adding spice, tragedy, love and drama to the novel’s trajectory.
The novel’s premise (which is at times shaky) is that time stands still or moves more slowly on the tiny islet of Murano, where glassmakers have historically crafted glassware of phenomenal beauty. And so centuries and wars outside of Murano have gone been and gone, people have lived and died and Orsola remains alive working there with glass.
I found this timewarp premise a bit much to believe and go along with to be honest. However, the saving grace of this very long family saga is the beautiful and evocative writing and scene setting of the peak of Renaissance culture, which I found thoroughly immersive and enjoyable.
As she walked, she looked, eyes wide. A monkey perched on a merchant’s shoulder. A woman wearing a tiara of seed pearls suspended like stars over her elaborate coiffure.
A man in a dusky-orange turban and white robes unsullied by Venetian dust. A fisherman carrying a crate of langoustines. A man with a mahogany chair upholstered in silk strapped to his back. And the smells. An intense attar of rose wafting from a woman’s cape.
The delicate intensity of saffron buns on a tray held high. The stench of the canals she crossed, full of rotten vegetables and the contents of chamber pots. And the sounds. Plenty of Venetian, but also a babel of languages she didn’t know. Turkish? Greek? Arabic? German? English? French? She could be hearing all of them.
Excerpt from The Glassmaker: A Novel by Tracy Chevalier
The Austrians might have changed some things, but the underlying fabric of the city remained. Houses colored ocher and tan and pink and yellow towered over them, blocking out the light, elegant with their filigreed arches, balconies and sculptures of lions adorning the facades. Laundry hung high above them, catching the sun and wind to dry. All around was the constant lapping and the damp, salty, smelly tang, and the shifting ripples of light from the water around and under them, providing the reassuring backdrop to Venetian life.
Excerpt from The Glassmaker: A Novel by Tracy Chevalier
One of the most enjoyable aspect of this book was how resourceful, practical and hardworking Orsola is, how determined she is to learn the skill of glass bead-making. It’s clear in the book (and very true in life) that true mastery doesn’t just “happen” to people, but rather is the result of hard work, persistence and an unwillingness to give up despite great disappointments and set backs. This triumph over the challenge in order to master a skill was very satisfying.
Each glassmaker is different, just as each singer sounds different, or every woman’s pasta is different.
Excerpt from The Glassmaker: A Novel by Tracy Chevalier
The family story about all of the big personalities all vying for attention, success and glory in the Rosso family got pretty tiring and was long-winded – to be honest I skipped through a lot of this. The long part about the Plague during the Renaissance era was a boring and unnecessarily dramatic. The book could have easily lost 200 or so pages and would have been better for it. A redeeming aspect of this book for me was the enduring love between Orsola and Antonio with his strong thighs and golden hair and their hot lovemaking on the Venetian canals. For this reason I would rate this book three stars.
