I've managed to clear a few books off my beside table and collect a few thoughts about them:
The Glass Maker - Tracy Chevalier
In summary:
MURANO GLASS STRUGGLES - FAMILY DYNAMICS - HISTORICAL VENICE - TIME TRAVEL
A lovely, well researched glance at Venice through the ages - the references to the changing life and costume of the gondolier were particularly interesting. It’s a tale of love lost and of change, centred around the life of a glass making family, the Rossos, on the island of Murano, near Venice, which begins in the 15th Century. The altering family dynamic encompasses the usual births and deaths, moving to how they and their community survived the plague, how they traded their glass products beyond the island, their vastly changing fortunes and later in the book, the effects of the Covid quarantine. How does the novel span such a long period of time and with the same family members? Because people age differently on Murano and the author has used a time jumping concept of a stone skimming onto the surface of water to propel the reader through six centuries.
I really liked whole sections of this book, especially the start of the novel, but the areas that I thought were interesting and would have loved to be explored further were not; much is made of the work and design of a necklace created for Empress Josephine, for example, for it to end up unaddressed by her and left unworn. I would have loved that story to have been developed in another way; it seemed to just fall flat. In fact, I felt that there were lost opportunities aplenty and that is a real shame. To have the bead work created by the women in the book be more appreciated would also have been nice. Perhaps a case of too many ideas? This book could have been so much more, in fact it could have been a series of books but, instead, we have many disappointing non-stories peppered throughout the novel and I found the time jumping irritating.
All in all, I would not recommend this book which feels like such a shame as the author is clearly an excellent writer.
The Mercies - Kiran Millwood Hargrove
In summary:
FEMALE RESILIENCE - WITCH HUNTS - HISTORICAL NORWAY - PATRIARCHY
A really interesting book, this one. Just the way it has been written is unique, with a language that feels of the time the story is set and I found the flow of it engaging. To me, it felt like it was written with a sense of how stories were traditionally told and passed down through generations.
Set in the small town of Vardø in Norway in 1617, a violent and unexpected sea storm wipes out the town’s entire population of men who were out in their boats, leaving the women to fend for themselves and deal in their own ways with their collective grief.
Faced with the arrival of a new male commissioner, the changes he brings to laws on religion and his preoccupation with ‘witches’, the home lives of the women, their friendships and how they respond to the newcomers is inextricably linked to their survival. The book is all about the female at a time when any behaviour or thinking outside of the ‘norm’ was dangerous for them; it is about the suppression of ideas and self under the crushing weight of male-ness and the male desire to control women in a bid to mask their own insecurities and ignorance.
Definitely one book I would recommend.
Matrix - Lauren Groff
In summary:
SPIRITUALITY - FEMALE POWER AND SEXUALITY - HISTORICAL ENGLAND/FRANCE
Let me start with gushing praise for Groff’s writing. The Vaster Wilds is a book that I recommend often; it was enjoyable, exhausting (I felt I had run from the beginning to the end :)) and memorable - what more could any reader ask for? So my expectations of Matrix were high - I also bought Fates and Furies at the same time, confident as I was that I would love them all. However, Matrix has become a DNF at the halfway point and I cannot put my finger on why except to say that reading it was becoming a chore and my TBR shelf is heavily laden with other temptations.
Matrix follows the fortunes of Marie de France, an overly tall, not very attractive relative of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine who is sent to 12th Century England by the Queen to live in a struggling abbey as a nun. As someone raised in the court, Marie is educated and resourceful, and turns the abbey into a powerhouse for the local community and for the nuns living within. Not particularly religious, Marie engages in same sex relationships throughout, from Cecily, her servant at court and later, nuns within the abbey, without feeling that the behaviour is any way blasphemous.
That’s as far as I got. Perhaps it was wrong book, wrong time coming off the back of The Mercies and Safe Keep, both of which include female-female relationships. I may return to it at a later date as it hasn’t at all turned my head away from this brilliant writer.
The Marriage Portrait - Maggie O’Farrell
In summary:
HISTORICAL FICTION - PATRIARCHY - CONTROL - MALE-FEMALE RELATIONSHIPS
Like Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell’s famous interpretation of Shakespeare’s family life, The Marriage Portrait draws again on an interesting historical figure, this time it is Lucrezia de’ Medici, the youngest daughter of the ruler of Florence in the 16th Century.
O’Farrell has brilliantly blended real history with her own fictional imaginings; the book opens with young Lucrezia believing that her husband is about to murder her because she has not given him an heir and we move backwards and forwards in time throughout the book and Lucrezia’s character is revealed to us, as a child (wild, curious, neglected) and of her life as a 13 year old bride. The way Maggie O’Farrell uses this foreshadowing is genius and makes the book unputdownable. Lucrezia’s husband, the Duke of Ferrara seems attentive at first, yet their wedding night is her first lesson in his duplicity: he tells her “she must not be scared, he will not hurt her” And then he hurts her anyway. Lucrezia soon learns that his kindness is contingent on her submission. In real life as in the book, Lucrezia was married to the Duke as a last-minute substitute for her older sister Maria who had died just before the wedding could take place. Three years later, she was dead. Many people believed that Lucrezia had not died of tuberculosis but had been poisoned by her husband and this rumour inspired Robert Browning to write his poem titled ‘My Last Duchess’.
The whole story, real and imagined by O’Farrell is achingly sad; we know the ending of the story before it really begins and that just urges the reader forwards, partly from morbid curiosity and partly from disbelief.
I would highly recommend this wonderful book.
Happy reading,
