Skims like a stone over water…
This is a fascinating, thought-provoking and heart-rending good read. Tracy Chevalier’s narrative skims like a stone over smooth water, warping time as effectively as fire transforms glass. Five-hundred-and-forty years, from the High Renaissance to the present day, are condensed to a life-time of sixty as the story follows the glass bead-maker Orsola Rosso, along with those she cares for, who all age far more slowly than the wider world. Their lives play out to a different rhythm, one tied to the Island of Murano in the Venetian Lagoon, a place isolated by tradition and geography which closely guards the secrets of glassmaking for which it is famed.
When world events impact Orsola’s life they do so dramatically. Her family is devastated by bubonic plague in the sixteenth century as well as by Covid-19 in the twenty-first. A nephew dies fighting in the Great War and her young sister dies in the Blitz. ‘You never recover from losing someone – you just learn to accommodate the hole it makes in you.’ Orsola encounters several famous names in history, beginning with Marietta Barovier, one of the first women to be permitted to operate a glass furnace, who inspires and encourages Orsola in lampwork beadmaking. Orsola is charmed by Casanova; she is commissioned to make a necklace for Josephine Bonaparte (in a failed bid to persuade Napoleon not to turn Venice over to the Austrians); her work is admired by the outrageously libertine Marchesa Casati who, naked under her robe, has dyed her pubic hair auburn to match the hair on her head.
Orsola moves from bead making as an art to producing beads for barter; she makes them for comfort and as talismans; she turns out seed beads by the thousand (‘mouse turds’ her brother calls them) to be used in making wreaths for fallen soldiers and later as decoration for leather bags hand-sewn by native American Indians. Often Orsola is so overwhelmed by privation and the demands of her family that she cannot make beads at all. Eventually she sets up shop with the daughter of her son’s second wife and runs the business successfully until the devastation caused by the flooding of Venice in 2019. History laps around Orsola like the riffle of flickering pages, often referred to with amusing brevity at the beginning of each chapter: ‘Caravaggio masters chiaroscuro and kills someone’… ‘The novel has come of age… (Virginia Woolf is just getting started)’.
Having discussed ‘The Glassmaker’ recently with a book group, I can see that some readers might find the time-hopping disconcerting, but I feel there is much more to this story than a study of a woman concerned with bead-making. I see ‘The Glassmaker’ as a study of creativity and the forces that drive us to want to express and connect. It is a story about the human condition common throughout the ages. It’s about love and loss and remembering. There’s a clue to all this at the beginning when Chevalier says: ‘Creatives often enter an absorbed state that psychologists call flow, in which hours pass without their noticing… Readers too.’ I can empathise with this. When an artist is at work, whether a writer or bead-maker, or anyone else, then time loses significance. It seems to stand still or speed up depending on your perspective. It can be the same with reading. Time does not move at the same pace for everyone, and of course time shifts in dreams and memories.
Again and again, Orsola offers her art for appreciation only to have the vagaries of fortune result in it not being seen. She makes a millefiori necklace for Casanova, but has to leave it on a wine crate, then learns that Casanova, heavily in debt, has been thrown into prison (no chance of payment from him!). She is asked to make a necklace for Napoleon’s wife (Orsola decides on ‘blood red drops with gold leaf beads between’) only for Josephine to never look at them. (They are given to a maid and stuffed inside an overflowing jewellery chest.) Every time Orsola fantasises about who might see her work and recognize her talent, her hopes are dashed or her dreams fizzle out. In the end it is her brother’s love: ‘that was as good as him saying she was the best bead-maker on Murano. Better.’ Despite this lack of encouragement, like a true artist, Orsola keeps on persevering. Sadly, she comes to accept that she is left making beads for tourists ‘that did not need to be bought’ in an age of global warming when her granddaughter chastises her for burning fuel in the torch she uses for her craft.
So why did Chevalier take such a bold and original approach to time-framing and not simply write a family saga or a multi-generational epic? I’d say it’s because she’s doing much more than following the passage of a family through history. As it is, Orsola’s family becomes large enough at the end of her long life; the characters are so numerous that I began to struggle to recall them all! But Chevalier clearly wanted to navigate a massive spread of history and reference it – much as Venice shows all her history through her architecture for thousands of tourists to see every day. Each building tells its own story, such as the Fondaco dei Tedeschi off the Grand Canal, a place that keeps recurring in the novel, first a trading house, then a customs house, next a post office, finally a luxury department store. Against this backdrop Chevalier is able to show that families fundamentally do not change and neither does human nature.
We can imagine ourselves with Orsola in the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, the Napoleonic era, the Great War and all the other epochs that she lives through because we can relate to the love she feels and the tragedies she endures, the pressure of family demands and her own struggles as a woman in a world dominated by men. We see a cyclical repetition of plagues and wars, success and misfortune on a grand and intimate scale, how art is affected by commerce, and trade by fashion and technology, how things carefully crafted can change in value unpredictably, sometimes worth a fortune, sometimes nothing at all. We see a world becoming ‘faster and more intertwined’, and individuals left curiously isolated. Throughout all this, humanity remains essentially the same. The young love-struck Orsola’s relationship with her mother, who forbids her from marrying Antonio Scaramal, a mere ‘Venetian fisherman’, is mirrored in Orsola’s relationship with her nephew, Rafaelle, when she forbids him from marrying a ‘rude, foolish girl from Cannaregio.’ (This is Lucianna, from a poor family, engaged to help as a or seed-bead stringer – the prohibition is unsuccessful but, thanks to the intervention of Orsola’s mother, contact with Rafaelle is not lost.)
At the heart of ‘The Glassmaker’ there is a poignant love story – that between Orsola and Antonio whose physical passion morphs to tender nostalgia years after Antonio has left knowing that there is no future for him as a glassworker in the Rosso household. ‘One day she realized she had spent only half of every minute thinking of Antonio… another day it was… every hour when the bells of Santi Maria e Donato rang. The measuring of time like this made her wonder if the bells wherever he was rang in the same way.’ The connection between them is kept alive by dolphins made from glass which are sent to Orsola intermittently throughout the rest of her life. By this means she imagines that somewhere Antonio is still alive and thinking of her. ‘After a time, the memory of Antonio was smoothed into a story in her head, like a bead with its rough edges rubbed down so it can be worn…’
Finally, a man arrives with another dolphin, the colour of those that have reappeared in the lagoon after the Covid pandemic. But this man is not Antonio, he is Allessandro Scaramal, and he does not know why the dolphins are made and sent; only that it has become a family tradition over hundreds of years. Why? Allessandro shrugs: ‘We’ve just been told to by our fathers, who were told by their fathers…’ I’ll confess to shedding a tear at this point. I found the conclusion of the novel profoundly moving.
There’s another beautiful relationship in ‘The Glassmaker’: that between Orsola and the African gondolier Domenego, clearly brought to Venice as a slave. The passage of time can be seen in the clothes he wears: first the black and white diamond hose and tight red tunic of the Renaissance, then a long tan jacket, then brown trousers with a white shirt, red sash and cap, until we hear of gondoliers wearing black trousers, striped shirts and straw hats like they do in the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas. Orsola takes the time to speak to Domenego when no one else seems to notice him. He helps with her trips to Venice and becomes the conduit for many of her messages and the glass dolphins she receives after Antonio has left. Domenego is tortured to reveal his friend’s whereabouts (one of his fingers is cut off), but he gives nothing away.
Quiet, fundamentally alone yet stoical, Domenego withstands all the sorrow that the world throws at him, buys his freedom yet remains, until he decides to leave for his home country (which he discovers to be Ghana) after his gondola is destroyed in the great flood. This time he is wearing a grey anorak when he meets Orsola in thick fog. All his possessions are in a small suitcase and he looks like so many other refugees. Orsola and Domenego hug for the first and last time, and Orsola gives him the precious rosetta bead first given to her by Marietta Barovier. ‘A little bit of Murano to take with you.’ She knows she will never see him again and that he’ll find none of his family left when he arrives. This too had a resonance for me which I found unutterably sad.
To sum up, I can see this book being talked about in classrooms and universities years into the future. I’m sure it will become a classic.
One parting quote: ‘As long as Venice’s canals stank of sewage, its rooms were dark and damp, its people melancholy and sardonic, it would maintain its true nature, which was so seductive. A pearl needs grit to be beautiful…’
Marvellous!
