CULTURE EDITION
“The writing is painful, but the research – that’s the best bit.” Tracy Chevalier tells Phoebe Harper about her spellbinding new novel, The Glassmaker T he unique beauty of Venice has seduced creative souls for centuries. Reams have been written attempting to capture the rare charms of La Serenissima, so for Tracy Chevalier, the question was how to do it differently. With the highly anticipated publication of her new novel The Glassmaker , Tracy turns something as small and potentially insignificant as a tiny glass bead into a portal, revealing the vast history of the craft and over five centuries of life in this captivating city. The novel’s genesis was originally sparked by one of Tracy’s readers, who suggested at an event that she research the significance of Venetian glass beads, their widespread use in trade and how they had historically been made by the women of Murano while sitting under lamplight at their kitchen tables. “He left me some books and I had a brief look at them that night, but then put them away,” she reveals. “For years, something stuck in the back of my mind; there might be a story here, and in 2018, it felt like time to get those books down from the shelf.” Heart of glass
chapters from its history,” Tracy says, introducing the concept of time alla Veneziana on which her characters live. “I just had to convince the reader to accept how I was playing with time – in the style of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando or Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life – and go with it.” She does this through the painstaking amounts of research that ground the story in its unrelenting detail, having spent significant time on Murano and Venice – even trying her hand at glassmaking on several occasions to ensure she could bring the historic craft to life on the page. “The writing is painful, but the research – that’s the best bit!” she quips. Tracy likens the novel’s movement to a stone skimming the water’s surface, briefly touching down on each seminal moment across the centuries. It is down to the mastery of her own writerly craft that each flows seamlessly without losing momentum, bringing each elaborate and opulent pearl together in sequence, like threading beads on a string. An Evening with Tracy Chevalier takes place at Waterstones Cambridge on Tuesday 1 October. Book your ticket now at waterstones.com/events
And so the story begins, taking us through the looking glass into quattrocento Venice, when the city was at its artistic and economic zenith. We are introduced to the Rosso family and our protagonist Orsola as she seeks to master a craft in a patriarchal world that will secure her family’s future. “History has always focused on those who had power; politically, socially and economically, this was primarily men, while women’s voices and the struggles in their everyday lives have been deemed unimportant. It’s these stories I’m trying to bring into the light,” Tracy shares. Although following the same family throughout, the novel plots an ambitious course spanning five centuries, where – although the rest of the world is changing – the characters barely age. It charts the family’s rise and fall, bypassing the 16th- century plague, the arrival of Napoleon, the 19th-century construction of a bridge that connected Venice to the mainland, as well as the 2019 floods and the Covid-19 pandemic, during which the novel was written. Along the way, we meet stars like Joséphine Bonaparte and Casanova, though we stick with the family throughout. “Venice itself is such a timeless place and I wanted to cover these significant
18 OCTOBER 2024 CAMBSEDITION.CO.UK
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