Once again, not usually my kind of thing, but I’ve heard good things about it, so maybe it was worth a punt.
Set in Venice during … well, we’ll get to that in a minute … this epic tale follows the life and nearly loves of Orsola Rosso, one of the fabled glass makers who lived in Murano (a stone’s skip from Venice) round about the time of the Renaissance. Through the use of a slightly unconventional timeline, Orsola and her family ply their trade across several centuries, including such upheavals as the plague, the coming of high-volume manufacturing, and finally (believe it or not) COVID. Along the way, Orsola makes new friends, loses family and pines for a love lost to her across the extended passage of time …
An unusual book for sure, but very well written. The sense of place you get from it is extraordinary. Venice across the centuries is so real, you can almost smell it. And the level of detail in every single character is, likewise, extraordinary and consistent across the time span. The author manages to touch upon just about every talking point under the sun: the role of women in working life, attitudes of the church, the lives of Jews, homosexuality … the list goes on. She, surprisingly, gives equal weight throughout the book, and keeps opinions rigidly in the realm of her characters.
The prose is workmanlike, and nothing really to write home about, but it does mean the reader doesn’t need to work too hard to keep up, which given the timeline, is probably a good thing.
The ending, for me, was somewhat problematic. I think the problem was that I was happy enough suspending belief for most of the book, but I felt that in the last few pages, the reasoning behind these people living for hundreds of years started to fray at the seams.
Still, overall a very enjoyable book.