Orsola is the daughter of a well-respected glassmaker from Murano, Italy in the 1500s. As a young woman of the time, she is not allowed to work in her father’s business. Rather, her activities are expected to be caring for the family home and the people within. However, she admires a matriarch from another family who is defying the odds and running her family’s glass business and Orsola embarks on her own path to satisfy her desire to create beautiful glass.
This is the setting for The Glassmaker by Tracy Chevalier. The story centers around Orsola’s experiences but covers life, business practices, and historically significant events throughout Venice and Murano across 500 years until present-day. I hadn’t known anything about the historical glass artisan families who were forced to work and live on Murano—the island just north of Venice. I had no idea that Murano glass had been produced for so many centuries.
The only thing I wasn’t crazy about was Chevalier’s device of telling Orsola’s story so that it halted periodically and then jumped ahead decades at a time to change the environment for her family. Chevalier plucked all her characters from the world and then put them down at a much later point in the future. Their lives continued in a changed situation where there were new inventions and situations which all the characters just handled in stride. Perhaps she thought Orsola’s true lifetime wasn’t exciting enough for a novel and she wanted to squeeze in all the history about this region of the world? I feel like she could have more successfully made this a generational story where she used Orsola’s descendants to tell the historical stories she wanted to cover. But Chevalier strung the reader along with glass dolphins that kept appearing across the years, supposedly from Orsola’s true love, presumably to keep us reading. Whatever her reasons, it bugged me every time the story jumped decades. It was clearly explained every time it happened but it was uncomfortable and illogical for Orsola’s story. I’ll say that I liked the way Chevalier reconciled the time jumps at the very end but the ending didn’t help me get over my bristling at the time-jumping.
The audiobook narrator was Lisa Flanagan. In general she was good but it took me a while to warm up to her because of her “narrator voice” when voicing the narrator. Why is this so frequently a problem for voice actors, especially in the audiobooks I’ve listened to lately? Why do they think they have to read the story so stiffly when characters are not actually having conversations? Sigh. At one point, she had to voice a parrot with a high squawking voice which was hilariously perfect. I’ll give her a B+.
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