April 1, 2024
Chevalier (Girl with a Pearl Earring) underperforms in this oddball fantastical epic about a Venetian glassmaker who ages incredibly slowly from the late 15th century, when she is a child, through the present day, when she’s in her late 60s. Chevalier introduces the conceit in a prologue: “The City of Water runs by its own clock.” Orsola Rosso’s glassmaker family’s profits are threatened in 1486 when her father, Lorenzo, dies in an accident. Orsola finds an unexpected ally in a woman glassmaker from another family who arranges for her to learn how to make glass beads so she can help support the family as her oldest brother Marco struggles to keep the business afloat. After Marco goes missing following a failed deal, a hunky stranger joins the Rosso enterprise as an apprentice, triggering a predictable romantic subplot between him and Orsola that’s unenhanced by clunky prose (“He wore brown breeches tight as a gondolier’s, and she could not take her eyes off the movement of his generous, muscled backside”). Chevalier then jumps to 1574, as Venice confronts the ravages of the plague. As the novel proceeds, historical events become even more compressed—Chevalier summarizes the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st century as marking “the fastest, most extreme change ever.” The superficial perspective gives the impression that the time jumps are window dressing for the clichéd story of a woman’s determination to push back against societal constraints. Readers will be left scratching their heads. Agent: Jonny Geller. Curtis Brown U.K.