From Tracy Chevalier, a master of historical fiction and author of Girl with a Pearl Earring, comes The Glassmaker, a remarkable saga
of family, love, and art of making glass, seen through the eyes of a woman whose life in the book spans over five centuries. When the story starts in 1486, Venice is a flourishing center of world commerce. Seagoing ships that bring exotic spices, precious woods, and opulent furs to the Venice ports carry away unique, highly prized Venetian glass made on the island of Murano.
We meet Orsola Rosso, the nine-year-old daughter of a Murano glassmaking family that has been creating beautiful glass for many generations. Orsola envies her older brothers, Marco and Giacomo, who get to work with their father Lorenzo in the glass workshop. Women are not allowed inside that magical place. Orsola and her mother cook, clean, do the laundry, and serve the men when they come out from the workshop. Glassmaking families zealously guard their trade secrets from each other and outsiders. By decree of the Venetian Doge, glass may be made only on Murano to protect Venice’s unique world monopoly. The Rossos’ family fortunes suddenly change when Lorenzo is killed by a flying shard of hot glass. Marco is still too young and impatient to steadily manage the works and produce high quality glass products. However, when the lot made by Marco is rejected by their agent in Venice, the family’s future is in peril.
By the wave of a “magical writer’s wand”, Chevalier miraculously slows down passage of time in Venice and Murano, while the rest of the world rolls at its usual speed. When sixty years have passed elsewhere, Orsola is now only ten years older. Although, women are still not permitted inside the workshop, Orsola has learned to make exquisite glass beads in order to put food on the family’s table. When the deadly plague comes to Venice and Murano, Orsola and her family survive by trading her beads for scarce food staples. In the world beyond Murano, the Renaissance blossoms in profusion of fine arts, sculpture, and painting. Europe is stunned by the French revolution and Napoleonic wars. Glass is still made in Murano like hundreds of years before.
Although Murano’s time still moves slower in the novel than elsewhere, another three hundred years have brought many changes to the Muranese. Venice doesn’t have a world monopoly on glassmaking anymore. Glass is now made in Germany and Bohemia, reducing the demand for Murano glass. Affluent visitors from England, Germany, and America stop in Venice on their Grand Tours. They enjoy winter carnivals, stay at the palazzos along the Grand Canal, take romantic gondola rides, and buy beautiful glass figurines as souvenirs of their travels.
Another hundred years pass. The middle-aged Orsola makes exquisite “Rosetta” beads that are in great demand by African kings, as well as tiny “seed” beads preferred by Native American Indians. Still more time goes by, and Orsola is now a renowned master beadmaker, a mother, and a grandmother. Venice is inundated by huge tourist crowds, and an unusually high “acqua alta” floods Orsola’s little shop at the St. Mark’s Square. 2019 brings painful isolation, many losses from the Covid-19 epidemic, and a message from Orsola’s long-lost lover.
In the Glassmaker, Chiaverini paints a powerful portrait of a woman who is as eternal as the ageless Serenissima itself. While the novel’s “time warp” premise initially appears to be fantastic and improbable, the author artfully brings it to life through an historically accurate narrative of the world and its impact on the Venetians. Descriptions of the glassmaking trade and everyday life in Venice and Murano are interspersed with appearances of the real persons such as: Marietta Borovier, a singularly influential woman glassmaker of the 17th century, the infamous Giacomo Casanova, and the Napoleon’s wife Josephine, to name a few. Orsola’s life in Murano and Venice flows seamlessly through the five hundred years with its changes, hardships, and victories. If you
have ever visited Venice you’ll love this book! This reader could not put it down!
