Book 52: The Lady and the Unicorn

NUMBER: 52
TITLE: The Lady and the Unicorn
AUTHOR: Tracy Chevalier
STARTED: June 10, 2006
FINISHED: June 12, 2006
PAGES: 250
GENRE: Fiction

FIRST SENTENCE: The messenger said I was to come at once.

SUMMARY: [From barnenandnoble.com] Paris, 1490. A shrewd French nobleman commissions six lavish tapestries celebrating his rising status at Court. He hires the charismatic, arrogant, sublimely talented Nicolas des Innocents to design them. Nicolas creates havoc among the women in the house—mother and daughter, servant, and lady-in-waiting—before taking his designs north to the Brussels workshop where the tapestries are to be woven. There, master weaver Georges de la Chapelle risks everything he has to finish the tapestries—his finest, most intricate work—on time for his exacting French client. The results change all their lives—lives that have been captured in the tapestries, for those who know where to look.

REASON FOR READING: My friend Katie wanted my opinion on the book. (We have yet to constrast and compare.)

THOUGHTS: I thought this Chevalier piece was just as good as Girl With a Pearl Earring. Chevalier took the tapersteries and wove (pun intended) her own intricated plot and narrative. I especially like how she used each chapter to show the different viewpoint of each character. In that way, each chapter was like a piece of thread in a tapestry. Each strand of yarn is complete, but it becomes more important when it is added to the bigger picture. My friend Katie said that she did not care about any of the characters. I could almost agree. I was only drawn to one character, the blind Alienor, but I thought the book was more than that. This was a novel about the creation of the tapestries, not the lives of the characters. In that way, it succeeded greatly.

Chevalier's prose was still has intricate and beautiful as I remember. I will continue to read her work, if only because she mixes fiction and reality with graceful ease.

MISCELLANEOUS: I regret not stopping to see these tapestries when I was last in Paris. I was in the right museum, but I skipped right by their room.

KEEP/SHARE/CRINGE(?): PBSing.

RATING: 7/10 [Very Good]
CR: The Little Ice Age by Brian Fagan
RN: Hopefully the first three Horatio Hornblower novels.