[I read this 2024 novel in three sections, writing about each section before reading on. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
21 May 2025
Part 1, Chapter 1
This novel has a gimmick. Tracy Chevalier tells us in the first page that she’s going to be playing with time. We don’t know exactly how, but there’s a prologue entitled ‘A Brief Explanation of Time,’ itself with the subtitle Alla Venezia so we know she’s going to be dusting off her knowledge of Italian as well. Time is unpredictable, and in Venice it ‘seems to run at a different pace from the outside world.’ And in the opening lines of Chapter 1 she uses the image of a skimmed stone skipping over water… ‘but replace stone with water.’ Got that? She might be starting in 1486, with Venice at the height of its prosperity, but she’s going to skim that stone from time to time. How? I’m not telling. Fast forward to Chapter 2 if you want to know.
Chapter 1 is in a conventional historical novel style, in the continuous present tense to make it seem that events are happening now, moment by moment. And its main character seems like a girl born out of her own time. I don’t mean that literally—Orsola, daughter of a glassmaking maestro on the world-famous island of Murano, is an ordinary nine-year-old girl. But during the long Chapter 1, she behaves far more like a modern girl than one born 500 or more years ago. All the signs point to her growing into a strong, confident woman—she’s already in her late teens by the end of the chapter—and whilst men might be competent, they’re no match for the proto-feminists. Orsola is nothing like that at first, learning from her mother Laura how it’s a woman’s lot to cook and do the endless laundry for men who stink of sweat by the end of every day. But by the end of the chapter, things are definitely moving on.
I called the style conventional, and Chevalier is treading safe ground in other ways. She is happy to take it as a given that we all know about the patriarchal attitudes of the past, with women having to defer to men, to speak when spoken to, and to do as they are told. And, just as obviously, the strong women in this story find hidden ways to do things for themselves. From a very early age, Orsola has some excellent role models who, one way another, seem to be showing her the way to a more fulfilling future. The most obvious of these is Maria Barovier, the wife of their close rival in the glassmaking business. In fact, she seems to be instrumental in expanding the business for her husband, who is more creative than the methodical Rosso, but chaotic. He needs a steadying hand, and she provides it. She is the only woman ever to have become a glassmaker in her own right… so how lucky it is for Orsola that some plot business brings her to Maria’s attention. Now she has a mentor.
Meanwhile, what else do historical novelists do? They work on the locations, and the details of day-to-day life. It’s another given that readers like nothing more than to be taken to a different world, so Chevalier does everything she can to place us in the milieu of Fifteenth Century Murano and Venice. We’re mostly on Murano, and mostly indoors in the workshop or the scullery, except for Orsola’s occasional views of the outside. As in the opening scene, when her arrogant oldest brother Marco pushes her into the water. Her mother tells her to dry off in—gasp—the Barovier workshop. Orsola suspects the push was her mother’s idea, so Orsola could go on a spying mission. But most of her short time in there is spent watching the formidable Maria, taking no nonsense from an apprentice whose work isn’t up to standard, before turning her attention to Orsola herself.
And that’s how it starts. From now on, for whatever reason, Maria takes notice of Orsola. Years must pass before she looks Orsola up and down, and has some cloth delivered so that her mother can make her a decent dress. Which she does, and Maria quietly approves its style. This becomes the beginning of a key storyline, Orsola’s initiation into the art of making beads. It’s the most that women can do, in any spare minutes they can find, and her discovery of the complexities of glassmaking even at this simple level becomes the reader’s too. We’ve only been onlookers before this, but now Chevalier can begin to get us inside the process. And we know that once she masters it—she’s managing nothing beyond the basics by the end of the chapter—it will be crucial to the novel.
The reason for her needing to learn is part of the storyline concerning the family. Her father is killed in a workshop accident, and Marco decides he must take on the role of maestro. He’s nowhere near ready, never having mastered the boring but necessary skills of making everyday glassware to order, each piece identical to the next. Instead, one time he spends weeks on an elegant and decorative goblet he’s proud enough to put on display. When, a few weeks after the father’s death, their usual buyer in Venice accepts only one more, below-par shipment, Marco goes to see him. It’s his usual hot-headed, impulsive style to take the goblet as a kind of showpiece for the firm. It’s a pity that, as Orsola, Laura and brother Giacomo have all tried, it’s far too shallow.
By now, we’re well into the nitty-gritty of Rosso family dynamics. When Marco doesn’t return from Venice, somebody responsible will need to go and find him. It will have to be the steady, kindly but rather shy Giacomo, and their mother decides he will be better off with the sharper Orsola by his side. Which is when we get our first trip to Venice. Chevalier wants to give us as convincing a tour as she can, so we get the sights, sounds (and everything else) as they reach Orsola’s astonished senses. Now a young woman, she is thrust into this rough, pawing man’s world with only Giacomo’s inadequate protection. They visit the merchant, Klingenberg, who tells them how badly Marco had behaved when told to take his goblet home. He tells them where to find the taverns, and someone there directs them to the red-light district. Eventually, they are guided through maze-like streets by Antonio, a kindly and rather attractive young stranger who had been with Marco. After a lot of looking they find him in an alley half-hidden by rubbish, sleeping off a hangover. He frantically looks for his masterpiece—until he remembers he sold it to one of the women in the brothel. Oh dear.
Time for things to move on, and to set another storyline going. Antonio offers to go back to the brothel to buy back the glassware, but Marco has no money left. As it happens, Antonio is hating life as the youngest in a family of fishermen, and says he’ll buy the goblet if Marco agrees to take him on as an apprentice. Orsola knows this is impossible, but Marco, still badly hung over, wants his masterpiece back. He agrees, and before you know it they’re back on the quay with the Murano boatman who brought them. Antonio insists that Marco tells him when he can come over to the island to start. October, he says, after the summer lull. By now, we know that Antonio finds Orsola as attractive as she finds him—so we await his arrival on Murano near the end of the chapter. Watch this space.
Next day, properly recovered, Marco is back to his usual boorish self. He is angry to have been fetched back like a baby, insists he knows how to run a workshop. He doesn’t. The growing slovenliness of the place and the empty order books have shown this very clearly. We already know their mother Laura is expecting a baby, and gets Marco to focus by playing a trick on him. She pretends she is likely to accept an offer of marriage from a rival maestro, who will solve their money problems by merging the workshops and becoming the new boss. Marco is enraged, smashes his beloved masterpiece… and realises he will have to mend his ways. By now Laura has told him that if she isn’t to marry the other maestro, he will have to learn his trade properly. She insists that Paolo, their best glassmaker, needs to take over for now. Which, by the end of the chapter, is exactly what is happening. And oh yeh, Marco has married an attractive but highly conventional young woman. At least she knows how to cook, if noting much else.
And what of Antonio? October arrives, and so does he, while Orsola happens to be at the waterside. What on earth might happen next?
Chapter 2
Nothing, that’s what happens, for 80 years. Or maybe two or three years, depending how you look at it. At the end of this even longer chapter Orsola, having lived in the same house as Antonio for two Murano years and more, is sinking into his arms for the first time ever. And in public, too—despite their interactions, until a few weeks ago, having revealed nothing of their true feelings. Antonio has even been seeing other women in the meantime. What has changed, in addition to history in the outside world having moved on to the 1560s—that’s what Chevalier’s skimming stone gimmick is about—is that the Rosso family has been locked down in quarantine for weeks, and she has been stealing snatched but very amicable moments of conversation with him as he becomes their main go-between with the outside world. Bless.
But, of course, this is a history lesson too. It continues in the same style as before, Chevalier the teacher telling us both what it must have been like in Venice in its 16th Century pomp, and in a household suffering all the horrors of the plague. And, also as before, this is a group of present-day time travellers getting the kind of immersive experience the Enterprise crew could only have dreamed of on the Holodeck. They’re living it, man. What I really mean is there is no attempt—it’s as though the concept is irrelevant—to offer the reader any idea of what a 15th, sorry, 16th Century mindset would be like. People in the past were just like us, weren’t they? Well, no. If I think about my parents, never mind my grandparents, their attitudes seem alien. But 1568 Orsola isn’t just a clone of 1486 Orsola, she’s literally the same person. That’s OK, Chevalier wants us to think, and it will no doubt have to be OK when we get to the 17th, 18th, 19th Centuries as well. People don’t change, only the clothes.
But I’m not telling you the plot, which I’ll do in note form. Busy domestic life. Add child-rearing. Growing confidence, determination, superpower skill. A deal with Klingenberg the merchant.
This chapter’s Venice Interlude. Spectacle. Preening (a word Orsola uses when thinking of what her beads are used for). Cosmopolitanism. But also the reality of the gondolier-slave Domenego’s life story. Racism and slavery.
That’s enough of that. Life at home. Marco improving as a glassmaker, but Paolo is the creative one despite Marco’s boorish refusal to see the qualities in others. Antonio—as skilled in his way as Orsola is in hers. His dolphins design—the future, no doubt—after only nine months’ apprenticeship. That’ll come in useful as the centuries pass.
Time for a big dollop of jeopardy. The plague. First Venice, but Murano seems to have been spared. But… a member of the Rosso family gets infected. Marco’s pretty, vain but rather impractical wife. All she can do is get pregnant, it seems, and she’s not far from doing it again when she succumbs. Picturesque descriptions of symptoms and suffering.
Meanwhile… Orsola’s developing skillset and, when the quarantine forces Marco to shut down the furnace, the shared enterprise (with Antonio) of selling beads. What a pity that everyone in the house dies.
Only joking. Really, they get through it. Only non-members of the Rosso family die, including a maid who has returned to Venice by then and Paolo—over whom Giacomo grieves just enough for the reader to believe there will be a gay storyline in some future where it becomes feasible. Laura goes with Marco’s wife to the quarantine island, and the chapter ends when she, ravaged and in rags after her ordeal, returns to Murano with another niece (or nephew) for Orsola. Now she’s three times an aunt.
Chapter 3
Life goes on, at two speeds. We’re familiar with the time-skipping conceit now: each chapter begins with a quick list of a few historical events, covering the 70 or 80 years of European history that has taken place while the Rosso family hasn’t been paying attention. This means that the lives of Orsola and other key characters in the novel move on only in chapter-length bursts, with decades-long gaps in between.
(I wish Chevalier didn’t keep reminding us how clever this is, coming back to her skimming stone image as though it was some kind of magic. In Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, the great-grandma of this time-skipping idea, the main character slips through centuries unnoticed. We’re happy to go along with it, because Woolf uses such a light touch in what becomes a fantasy of changing (or unchanging) social and gender roles. In contrast The Glassmaker, aside from this one element, is as realistic as Chevalier can write it…
…which can make things awkward. It’s clear that she wants to show how determined a woman has to be—and has always had to be—if she is to make her way in any kind of non-domestic enterprise. She endows her main character with the right level of grit and determination, and adds other qualities into the mix. I can see why she’s gone for the time-skipping approach. A 15th Century woman could make beads in a domestic setting, but that would be all. A 16th Century woman, we’re to believe, would be able to go further, visiting the Rosso family’s buyer and making her own deals. And so on. But how to make the Rosso timeline mesh with that of the outside world? Answer: don’t even bother to try. We simply have to accept that Domenego the African gondolier still works for the same merchant, Klingenberg and his family. How would that work, with them ageing at a snail’s pace while around them in Venice the centuries pass? Don’t ask—because if you do, it doesn’t work.)
I suspect this novel is really about the creation of an international glassmaking company led by a determined, business-savvy woman. Instead of going for a multi-generational family saga, Chevalier has focused it all on one woman, Orsola Rosso. Born in the 1470s, she will be able to take it all the way from a 15th Century cottage craft to a Europe-wide 20th or 21st Century empire. I’m guessing, of course—Orsola’s skills are still being dismissed as women’s work by the preening Marco in 1631, which is where we’ve reached—but you wait. And while the women around her produce children, Orsola has another power: she can have sex without bringing a pregnancy to term. It’s tough enough in this man’s world for women without children, never mind mothers. We might wonder whether the new chief assistant, Stefano from the Barolier stable, will have any more luck giving her children to add to the nieces and nephews she already helps to look after.
Orsola had hoped to marry Antonio, and they had been practising their wedding night for months, but Marco is jealous of his originality and quick mind, and pointedly overlooks him for promotion. So Antonio has absconded to the mainland—a dangerous thing to do with the Murano guilds and their ‘police’ determined to keep the island’s secrets—and now Orsola has found out that he lives and works in Prague. By the very end of Chapter 3, Stefano might have found his way into Orsola’s bed, but we obviously haven’t heard the last of Antonio.
This is the big picture. Marco thinks he is founding his own dynasty, and had given Stefano permission to marry Orsola—he will bring a lot of useful skills to the business—without asking her what she thought of the idea. Antonio’s disappearance to one of the foreign glassmaking centres fast catching up with Murano in the 17th Century is what makes me think Orsola’s own business will grow far beyond Murano and Venice. When, instead of merely hoping that your own daughters will be able to build on your work in a better future you can bide your time and do it yourself, so much the better.
Meanwhile, Chevalier still has a historical novel to write. This involves births, marriages and occasional deaths, the last of these usually offstage. Marco’s wife had died in quarantine by the end of Chapter 2, and poor Laura’s health was almost broken by the many weeks she had spent with her there. But from now on, family life is all about new lives. Marco needs a wet-nurse for the baby girl born in quarantine, and the no-nonsense Monica is ideal. She has her own baby, moves in—and soon Marco has made his way into her bed. Then poor Giacomo marries another woman from the fishing community, to an even more forthright wife he’s no match for, and more children start to arrive. These domestic scenes, including Orsola’s constant juggling with bead-making, childcare and laundry, are a soap opera. There are family members vying for the upper hand, money worries, tricky marital waters…
…and then Marco drops his double whammy. Just as things couldn’t be going better between Orsola and Antonio, Stefano gets the job of chief assistant and she finds out Antonio is on his way to ‘terra ferma’. There’s nothing for him here, but Orsola is beside herself. Marco has just told her Stefano is to marry her—she was obviously a big incentive for him, because he’d always been a bit doe-eyed over her—and she refuses. She can’t keep her cool, and leaves the house in a rush. She catches up with Antonio—how could he dream of leaving her?—but is taken aback by his offer to take her with him. How could she leave everything? And there’s the rub. She stays, grieving almost uncontrollably at first, and only reaching some kind of calmness after months. Which is when Stefano, always a considerate man if not a patch on Antonio, makes her a beautiful mirror to hang in her bedroom. When he asks if he can see it in its place, she lets him in.
Meanwhile… business. Aside from all the childcare, laundry and the rest, she’s trying to add to her bead-making skill-set. Except for a few months when she’s so grief-stricken she can’t even look at her lamp and bellows. She tells Monica she’s going to give up—there’s too much competition now, both on and off the island—and Monica tells her to pull herself together. Which she does. And she starts to have ides again—of course she does—and soon she’s on the way to see Klingenberg again, this time with a new neckless on display. He takes the bait—and she’s taken another step towards a future only a kindly author can dream of.
It’s Domenego the African who tells her about Antonio. He pretends not to know where he’s gone, tries to hide the gap where a finger was cut off during torture to reveal all—but Klingenberg’s daughter Klara accidentally finds out some details, which Domenego confirms. Antonio has sent a package to the merchant’s house, to be forwarded to Orsola—a tiny glass dolphin that matches, with variations, one he had given her before he left. When Klara sees the two together—Orsola always has the first one with her—she realises that the nose of one cleverly hooks into the tail of the other. And did I mention that it was Orsola who taught Antonio this kind of fine glass-spinning during lockdown? You can see the threads of connection that will no doubt become tighter.
Part 2
Chapter 4
A huge leap in time, to the 18th Century, and even the Rosso family has aged by eight years. Orsola is now 29, and has a young daughter, Angela, who she loves far more than Stefano. But a household with eight children in it, from Orsola’s still-young sister Stella down to the latest niece or nephew, is too crowded and noisy to work in. She needs some space, and when the sharp-eyed Monica sees how things are becoming impossible, she tells Marco the under-used store room can be sorted out to give Orsola a little workshop. He agrees, grudgingly, Monica having become the archetype of how clever, well-organized women nudge recalcitrant husbands in the right direction. Bless.
But something will have to give. I mean, for Chevalier’s project to really come to something. Marco is himself an archetype of patriarchal attitudes—how will Orsola ever climb out from under his deadening weight? Fashions have changed, and Klingenberg tells her the new market for beads is Africa. She needs to learn the technique of creating flatter, millefeuille-style beads… which, of course she does. And I get the sense that Chevalier is going to have mercy on her downtrodden heroine soon, because millefeuille is to be the next new thing. That necklace Orsola made for Klingenberg all those years ago didn’t lead to anything, but now she’s going to try something new. Meanwhile, other Murano women are cornering the market for the simple beads that used to be Orsola’s staple—and I think it’s Monica’s clever, endlessly inquiring daughter Rosella who helps her to take the next step. She looks at Orsola’s half-dozen or so dolphins—Antonio continues to send them, having taken the Rosso time-magic with him—and, having instantly understood both their beauty and how they join together, she makes other connections. She recognises them as Antonio’s work, and tells Orsola she should make some like them. She’s noticed the new thing in town, little glass ornaments—and Orsola realises sea creatures could be another new thing for her.
Chevalier girls and women are always good both at putting their heads together and helping one another, as we have often seen. Everything that has helped to bring Orsola to her position of being more in charge—a small enough achievement compared to what men have—has been through other women. (Klingenberg’s extremely useful marketing advice is the exception, and Orsola’s minor success always comes as she builds on what he has told her.) Now, it looks as though what will relieve the pressure on her from the patriarchy will come from the men who benefit most from it. By the end of Chapter 4, it’s looking as though the most famous womaniser in history has brought Marco’s self-aggrandising project to its knees. Is he ruined?
How to get the notoriously reckless Casa Nova (for it is he) to the Rosso workshop and saleroom? Chevalier needs some plot business to bring it about, involving Orsola paying Domenego to take her on a day trip to terra ferma. It’s a three-hour slog for him, each way, but Chevalier has been giving her, and the reader, some lessons in the realities of slavery and bonded labour. He needs an eye-watering amount of money if he is to buy his freedom—40,000 of those one-soldo beads Orsola began with—so she isn’t asking for free lifts any more. She finds nothing much to look at on land beyond steaming piles of horse-shit, something she has neither seen nor smelled before, so she decides to go back. Also hanging about on the dockside is a dandified Venetian, who makes it clear he would love to spend some time with her. She is charmed despite herself, but Domenego whisks her away. We realise later he knows something she doesn’t.
This is Casa Nova, and he catches up with her on another gondola. They talk, despite Domenego’s unease, he pours her a glass of wine… and she continues to be charmed. She tells him her name, about Rosso glass—and when Domenego finally veers off to get her away, she finds herself still clutching the wineglass. Which the dandy promises to come and retrieve, so she had better keep it safe. And reader, he keeps his promise. Orsola is relieved when Marco, realising the quality of the gentleman who has arrived, puts on a big show for him. Every woman in the house does her bit to make him feel welcome and, in his usual way, Marco talks about the quality of what he does. Helped by his highly capable assistants, of course. And the charm offensive works, surprisingly well. Four dozen wineglasses, a standing mirror—Stefano’s speciality—and the piece de resistance, a huge, highly decorated chandelier. They will have to put all their other orders on hold for weeks, but it will be worth it. (Has Orsola mentioned to Marco that she is also making something for their client? It’s a necklace, developed from the beads she’s making for Klingenberg and the glass creatures she’s been making for the locals. Clever Orsola.)
Orsola, of course, is the one to find out who this ‘Casa Nova’ is. An aunt of hers, now a nun, knows all about him. He visits the convent often, and almost all the nuns have gifts from him. Even she, the aunt, is wearing silk stockings against the chill. She had laughed out loud when Orsola had mentioned his name, and is full of stories, but is herself shocked when she realises what Marco has agreed to do for him. Orsola has understated the order, not even mentioning the chandelier at all, as her aunt makes it clear how often their ‘gentleman’ fails to pay. Orsola realises with horror what this might mean for the family business and, on her return, tries to warn Marco. Who, of course, ignores her. That’s the trouble with men in Chevalier-land. They never understand that what women give them is the best advice there is.
The upshot is inevitable. Orsola and Stefano go in person to deliver her necklace and his mirror—and it happens to be the day when the balloon is about to go up for their client. His ‘patron’, a high-up Venetian politician, is leaving the palazzo looking stern, and nobody is going to be handing over any money today. They are forced to take their wares back to Murano—shortly after which, as the men in the workshop celebrate the completion of the chandelier, Domenego brings some catastrophic news. Casa Nova has been arrested. Marco has delivered nothing to Klingenberg for weeks, perhaps even months, and now the contract that was to make his name is likely to ruin him instead. Chevalier isn’t saying, but I think we should be thinking about what future there might be for that necklace of Orsola’s. And the other, no doubt highly saleable piece, her husband Stefano’s mirror. These two, and clever little Rosella…. I can imagine a business run by Orsola, with Rosella as PA and husband as maestro. How could it fail? (OK, there’ll be terribly rough times ahead. But just you watch.)
Chapter 5
I was right about the rough times, but wrong about everything else. Time in the outside world is accelerating, and this chapter takes us from the 1780s, when Napoleon is about to invade, to the 1840s. By the end of it, the Venetians’ Austrian masters—try to keep up—are building a railway bridge from terra ferma. The Rosso family are getting older too, but not at that rate. And they have fallen on hard times. By the time Marco is trying to restore Klingenberg’s faith in him he’s too late, as Napoleon’s unstoppable advance sends a lot of wealthy Venetians to the mainland. The market for high-end products has almost disappeared—and anyway, there’s been a huge amount of foreign competition for years now.
Which means the necklace and mirror never do find buyers. They languish in the storeroom along with the chandelier, now gathering dust, and the four dozen wineglasses. For a brief moment it looks as though Chevalier might be offering Orsola an impossible-seeming stroke of luck. Klingenberg sends for her to make a necklace, for—guess who? It’s for Napoleon’s consort Josephine, and she has three days to do it. Perhaps a superb gift like that, proof both of the Venetians’ skilfulness and their respect for Josephine, will make her persuade Napoleon to allow the Republic to remain self-governing? Can Orsola save their little world?
No she can’t. She seeks out Klara who, she knows, will be able to tell her all about Josephine’s look and colouring. Back home, both Stella and Rosella give her shrewd advice about what would look perfect. It looks as though the women have saved the day… which might have happened, if Josephine had actually looked at the necklace. As Klingenberg presents it to her in its beautiful display box, she doesn’t even glance at it. So the only good that comes of it is Orsola’s fee, which Klingenberg honours. It keeps the family well fed through the winter.
Because, reader, Chevalier has reached the nadir of Venice’s fortunes. Its early days as the most important trading centre in the Mediterranean are long past, as Spain, Portugal and the rest look to the Atlantic. For maybe 200 years it had been able to rely both on its skilled artisans for exports and its attractiveness to wealthy tourists. But high-end glassware is being made all over Europe by now, so exports have slowed to a trickle, while Napoleon’s takeover has put an end to tourism. If anything, things become worse under Austrian rule—Cavalier likes a quick dash through decades of history—because they slap tariffs on glass. In a set-piece scene, Orsola returns from Venice one time to find Marco drunk at ten in the morning, and the furnace cold.
These are lean times. Chevalier tells us more than once that she’s going to skip over the horrible bits—near-starvation doesn’t make for an entertaining read—as the family considers other work. Fishing? Taking in laundry? But no. On one of her last visits to Klingenberg, who is going to pack up and leave for Germany, his assistant shows her groups of local women stringing seed beads. There’s a big market for them among Native Americans and, after a lot of heart-searching about how her old skills have become obsolete, she takes the idea back home. Stefano knows the process of making them, but who on earth is going to try and persuade Marco? Answer: the women, playing a week-long game of softening-up and waiting for the exact moment when he isn’t so drunk as to become aggressive.
So that’s what they decide to do. Thanks to Stefano, the men soon learn the surprisingly strenuous but fairly mindless skill of making the beads. Marco is in charge of the furnace, of course, and the others have the task of turning the glass into a hollow thread of glass 100 yards long. Which is only the start, because once the tiny beads are made, most of the women and girls of the house will have to string them. Except, they find, stringing them fast seems impossible. I’m telling you this because it lets Chevalier bring in the next strand in the Rosso family soap opera. The girl she can have sent over from Venice, Luciana, is the very one she hadn’t liked the look of—but she and the most attractive of the Rosso boys, Raffaelle, find one another irresistible. Luciana bides her time, but when it becomes clear that Raffaelle is about to do something stupid, Orsola lets her know her time with them is over. And Raffaelle does the stupid thing anyway, leaving with her on the next gondola out of there.
They want him back. For Marco, it’s an alpha male thing—no scrap of a Venetian whore (or whatever) is going to take away the brother of Marco Rosso, oh no—but to make it much more interesting, Chevalier has Laura tell for the first time about Raffaelle’s birth. His mother had actually died during the first minutes of giving birth, and the child still unborn. She had to prevent the body, with the unborn child inside, from being unceremoniously dumped, and had performed a crude Caesarean. Everybody, including the reader, can see what Raffaelle means to her—but she realises that men don’t feel the same way about things as women. When they find him, will he understand?
No, he won’t. The railway is coming by now, and Raffaelle is working as a labourer at the Venice end. The Rosso family know his glassmaker’s strength is nothing like what he will need—he’s clearly exhausted after only a day of the incredibly heavy work—but when Marco starts shouting his orders at him he becomes stubborn. Maybe if the task had been left to the women—Chevalier runs the idea past us—things would have turned out different. But Raffaelle is staying. All Laura can do is warn Luciana’s mother that they had better find him some suitable work. The woman is sarcastic, and Laura goes all passionate Italian on her, threatening to send the Murano glass-men to kill her. The woman believes her, and promises.
Meanwhile, things have been moving on in Venice. The Austrians have realised that Venice can be an asset to them, so the tariffs are long gone and tourism is beginning to boom again. The new market is for small pieces of fine glass that can be taken home in luggage—it isn’t only the richest who are travelling now, and this looks as though it might be a way forward for the Rosso family. But as for Stefano and Orsola…. Chevalier has never let the reader forget about Antonio in Prague. The dolphins rarely come any more, but that doesn’t stop Stefano finally discovering what it is that Orsola always carries in her pocket. She tries to pretend it’s nothing, but he knows. He has Angela, perhaps the most loving bond in the novel, but it isn’t the same. We wonder what Chevalier will have in mind for them when another century or so has passed.
Chapter 6
And… it’s 1915. The now unified Italy is finally going to join the war, fighting against the Austrians and Germans but, while history has moved on—nothing to look at here, apart from that unfortunate shooting in the Balkans—the Rosso family has stayed where it is. I mean, they’re still making seed beads, and even Marco seems to have resigned himself to the undemanding predictability of the work. The passing of decades in Venice, more markedly than ever, has left them behind. So it’s a good job there’s a Rosso woman with a bit of enterprise, yes? Yes—it’s only a pity that it isn’t Orsola. Luciana, now Raffaelle’s wife, is now running Fiori Rosso, a name Orsola doesn’t like at all. She’s commissioning seed beads of many colours, and her craftswomen are using wire armatures to form them into beautiful flowers for the French market.
That isn’t Orsola’s thing at all. She can’t deny the elegance of the craft, but it isn’t anything like her own artistry in glass. She’s started up again, because new employees are keeping Marco’s business chugging along. It isn’t a workshop any more, it’s a factory, and Orsola doesn’t need to be involved. She even has a new, far more efficient gas burner…. But she needs another kick to get her focused on something new. This chapter is the third and final one of Part 2, which is subtitled Three Necklaces. We know about the unsold piece for Casa Nova and the one that Josephine didn’t bother to look at. But maybe a 20th Century attempt, for a larger-than-life Marchesa, will break her jinx. She makes sure she is paid for the commission before she makes it—and hopes that when people see the highly visible Marchesa wearing it, it will make her name. To cut to the chase, it doesn’t.
Ironically, her accidental contact with the Marchesa (through her collaboration with a dressmaker) seems to have done Marco a favour. He decides to make a couple of goblets in the extravagant style she favours, and he makes a theatrical entrance by gondola to her palazzo. This is now a luxury mode of transport, vaporetti now providing rides for routine journeys, and he is wearing a new suit and hairstyle. And his scheme works—completely overshadowing Orsola and her necklace. The Marchesa is all over Marco, literally, almost as soon as he is indoors. She loves the goblets, and hardly notices either the necklace or the earrings made to go with it. Orsola leaves Marco to be entertained—which he is, for nearly three days—and he gets a big commission. But that eventually comes to nothing, because she leaves Venice. All Marco can do now, and after the war, is make goblets to sell in their Murano shop. Can’t they do anything right?
They do seem to be stuck in their ways. Perhaps it’s a problem with being born in the 15th Century, you have a different sense of the place where you belong. And the hyperactive Luciana, the one Orsola never liked, is making her feel old. She’s having children, and her ‘Fiori’ workshop is so successful she is now proposing a merger. Rosso and Rosso would be the new name, with the Murano Rosso workshop providing the seed beads. Now, step by step, she becomes the power to be reckoned with. Laura has died, never quite having got over the loss of Raffaelle, and Luciana clearly sees an opportunity. She proposes a move to Murano and the Rosso family premises. The women in the house are appalled, but it happens. Step by inexorable step, Orsola feels herself being pushed to the sidelines—and just when Marco had started treating her work with a bit more respect. Could it be that his centuries-old attitudes are moving on? It might—but it seems irrelevant now.
All my speculations about Orsola the queen of business were way off, and I’m pretty sure Chevalier never had that intention. Entrepreneurship is one thing, but Orsola’s story is about the lack of opportunities for women artists over the years. What finally, finally gets her to move to Venice is through that other thing that women are good at in this novel. Achieving through mutual support. The younger generation of Rosso women don’t have Orsola’s artistic eye, but they do have other qualities. I think it’s Angela and Rosella who finally take up the advice Orsola has been getting since the end of the 18th Century. They have found a little shop in a perfect location in Venice. Orsola isn’t at all sure, and the idea of them displaying themselves in the window, working, would feel like prostituting herself. She never did get it, this marketing thing. I think it’s Karla, now a friend and with money of her own, who persuades her. And she, another woman, provides the loan. Aww.
Meanwhile, the War has come and gone. It’s Sebastiano, Marco’s rather unremarkable son, who had volunteered to be the family’s mandatory volunteer. He is killed soon after and, for a time, Raffaelle feels mildly guilty he let him go in his place. But, as so often, Chevalier brings up the subject briefly before moving on and forgetting about it. Stella, Orsola’s independent-minded sister—they all have their USP, and that’s hers—leaves to join a group of nursing volunteers. To nobody’s surprise, she never comes back, preferring to make a life in London instead. And I realise that a real problem in this novel is the lack of any character development. We’ve been with this family for 300 pages and more, and it isn’t just family life that stays the same with the passing centuries, it’s each individual member of it. Marco is like this, Monica is like this, Luciana is like this…. Is this why I don’t feel any involvement? Sebastiano was a minor character, only ever sketched in to make up the numbers, so we’re bound not to care when he dies in the war. But, really, do we care about any of them? Even Orsola only has a one-dimensional story. Girl discovers glassmaking and the love of her life. Girl loses love, but the glassmaking carries on. Girl marries a substitute, but never stops pining for her lost love.
Are we nearly there yet?
Part 3, Chapters 7 and 8—to the end
Yes, we are. Nearly there—because a single chapter brings us at a gallop to the time of Covid, and Chapter 8 is no more than a short coda. I suspect Chevalier is pleased with her final conceit, neatly tying up the story of the dolphins from Prague, because Part 3’s subtitle is Real Dolphins. It’s in celebration of exactly that, seen in the Lagoon for the first time ever, while Orsola finally discovers the story of those gifts over the centuries. Could Antonio have stayed alive, while—as Orsola knows perfectly well—she and the people she knows have been ageing at only about one year in every ten? Tell you later.
In 2019, things are pretty much the same as nearly a century before. Marco hasn’t made his name making upmarket glassware for an ever-shrinking clientele, so seed beads have continued to be the main source of income. But the Chinese have undercut prices, so all the Rosso family can do now is what the few remaining workshops do, make smaller products the tourists can take home easily. Rosso and Rosella, the shop in Venice, has been successful enough for Karla’s loan to be paid off… and so on. Nothing to look at here, literally, except for Orsola now being in her sixties and plodding on. I can’t be the only one who thinks nothing interesting has happened in this novel for a long time now. Leaving aside Chevalier’s little time gimmick, as far as family sagas go… this one is a dud.
Perhaps a catastrophe might shake things up a bit? Not Covid, to start with, but the famous storm-surge that flooded Venice and the other islands in November 2019. Part 3 opens with Orsola and Stefano, now living in their own apartment-workshop on Murano to get away from Luciana. The water is rising, and they are taking things upstairs… and so on. Have I only just realised that Venice has become far more important—and at least slightly more interesting—than Orsola and her little life? From the start, Chevalier has been reminding us of what’s going on, from its glory as a trading hub and artistic powerhouse to its craftsmanship to its role as a backdrop for the fantasies of thousands—now millions—of tourists. Chevalier tells us how many millions, reminds us of the oversize cruise ships… and so on.
I keep writing ‘and so on’ because there’s so little that’s surprising. Like Orbital, which I read earlier this year, this novel shows all the signs of an author interested in researching her chosen topics. And as in Orbital, the mise en scene has more life than the characters. All Chevalier can do with the these now is bring things to some sort of closure. Literally, in Stella’s case—she was killed in the London Blitz—and in Stefano’s, killed by Covid just when Venice had finished drying itself off after those pesky floods. Orsola goes to his funeral, alone, and is uncharacteristically very glad indeed to see Marco in his best suit. There’s a kind of understated reconciliation, and he suggests she come to live with the rest of the family… but she reminds him why she left in the first place. Chevalier even has them doing a banterish reprise of their full-on swearing match during the flood to show how OK they are. How we laughed.
So now Orsola is alone. Klara has lovers, the younger generation treat her as if she was born centuries ago, and… what’s an old woman to do? Her mojo seems to have left her, so that even familiar favourites are impossible to make to the same standard. At least she can always do a bit of quiet pining for Antonio to pass the time. But wait. Isn’t that Antonio she can see outside the workshop? Is he really coming over to knock at her door? He is, and he isn’t. He is knocking, but he isn’t Antonio. His family, which has Antonio’s surname, has always had a tradition of every son sending a dolphin to an address in Venice. She couldn’t be, could she, Orsola Rosso? She whose name has been a middle name for daughters since the time of Antonio in the sixteenth Century?
This man is about the same age that Antonio would have been had he stayed. He looks like Antonio in every way. He is travelling alone. Chevalier isn’t asking, but could this be the start of a beautiful friendship? Whatever, aren’t there some novels which, by the end, make you feel glad that you won’t have to read any more?
We can read it for you wholesale 