The Glass Ocean: A Novel - Softcover

Baker, Lori

2.93

330 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143125664 ISBN 13: 9780143125662

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2014

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I write in retrospect, from the vantage of a distant shore.

Flame-haired, six-foot-two in stocking feet, eighteen-year-old Carlotta Dell’oro recounts the lives of her parents—solitary glassmaker Leopoldo Dell’oro and beautiful, unreachable Clotilde Girard—and discovers in their loves and losses, their omissions and obsessions, thecircumstances of her abandonment and the weight of her inheritance. Thomas Pynchon calls debut novelist Lori Baker “a storyteller with uncanny access to the Victorians, not only to the closely woven texture of their days but also to the dangerous nocturnal fires being attended to in their hearts.”

Carlotta’s story begins in 1841, when Leo and Clotilde meet aboard the Narcissus, on an expedition led by Clotilde’s magnanimous, adventuring father. Leo is commissioned to draw the creatures of the deep sea, but is bewitched instead by golden Clotilde, beginning a devotion that will prove inescapable. Clotilde meanwhile sees only her dear papa, but when he goes missing she is pushed to Leo, returning with him to the craggy English shores of Whitby, the place to which Leo vowed he would never return.

There they form an uneasy coexistence, lost to one another. The events of the Narcissus haunt them, leaving Clotilde grieving for her father, while Leo becomes possessed by the work of transforming his sea sketches into glass. But in finding his art he surrenders Clotilde, and the distance between the two is only magnified by the birth of baby Carlotta.

Years have passed, and Carlotta is now grown. A friend from the past comes to Whitby, and with his arrival sets into motion the Dell’oros’ inevitable disintegration. In hypnotic, inimitable prose Lori Baker’s The Glass Ocean transforms a story of family into something as otherworldly and mesmerizing as life beneath the sea itself.

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Review:

Essay by Lori Baker: Glassblowers Who Inspired the Character of 'Leo'

In 1853, Leopold Blaschka, a young artist, jeweler and glassmaker from Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) traveled to America for business and for the sake of his health; when his ship was becalmed in the Atlantic, he began, as artists will, to draw. "We are on a sailing ship in the Atlantic Ocean, immobilized because of the calm," Blaschka wrote. "It is a beautiful night in May. Hopefully we look over the darkness of the sea, which is as smooth as a mirror: In various places there emerges all around a flashlike bundle of light beams, like thousands of sparks, that form bundles of fire and bundles of other bright lighting spots, as if they are surrounded by mirrored stars. What Blaschka was describing, in this letter translated from the German by scholar Henri Reiling of the University of Utrecht, were glowing jellyfish, emerging on the dark surface of the night sea.

This “indescribably beautiful scene,” as Blaschka put it, was also, for him, the starting point, the cold spark of inspiration, for what would become a life’s work. Carefully drawing the creatures that were gathered during that journey, Blaschka, on his return home, began to attempt to recreate what he had seen in glass.

The result, over the course of what would become many years work and a livelihood for himself and for his son, Rudolph, were hundreds of models of marine animals, eventually reproduced and sold to museums around the world. The Blaschkas modeled plants, too, and are perhaps most well-known today as the creators of the Ware Collection of Glass Flowers, held at Harvard University’s Museum of Natural History, a popular exhibit that draws many thousands of visitors annually. Thus the Blaschka sea creatures continue to exert their fascination even today, despite the fact that science has moved on, with the means to observe, collect, preserve, and photograph specimens that the Blaschkas and their contemporaries could never have imagined. Still the Blaschkas’ sea creations are held in museum collections around the world and are the subject of articles, books, blogs, poems, essays, photojournalism, and now even a film, Fragile Legacy, by Cornell University scientists and researchers, that will seek to document how the Blaschka animals are faring in today’s oceans -- a scientific “full circle” that Leopold Blaschka would certainly have appreciated.

What is it about these glass creatures that exerts such fascination? Their beauty, certainly – and the obsessive craftedness of their creation, so selfless that, in a sense, style is completely subsumed. In these works of art, these most made of man-made objects, the hand of the artist is everywhere, and nowhere. It is hard to believe that somebody could have fabricated these, so organic do they appear. More than one hundred years later, the Blaschkas sea creatures -- their squids and octopuses, their jellyfish and sea slugs and snails and anemones and starfish, still seem to pulse with life. And yet they are not alive. They are like snowflakes: glittering, gorgeous, more complicated than we can rightly comprehend. And as ephemeral.

It is such a changeless thing that we do not dare in its construction to make a mistake; it becomes eternal, Leopold Blaschka wrote of his work in glass. Maybe this is what draws us back, again and again, to Leopold Blaschka’s creatures: the haunting and crystallized effort to stop time, to capture what cannot be captured, to preserve that which is quickly passing, to hold on to what will very soon be gone.

This is the aspect of their work that fascinated and inspired me to write my novel, The Glass Ocean. Though based only loosely on the Blaschkas’ lives, The The Glass Ocean is very much inspired and informed by their beautiful, mysterious, and confounding body of work. In it, a glassmaker, Leo, attempts through his own, obsessive artistic project, to stop time – literally to stop heartbreak in its tracks, as his marriage dissolves around him. This takes place against the background of 19th century England, a time of social and scientific ferment and upheaval, a time when new technologies and discoveries were changing the nature of work, families, and religion. It was a time of excitement and exploration, but also of anxiety for societies, families, and individuals.

Though my research for the novel was initially spurred by my fascination with the Blaschkas’ glass creations, as I dug more deeply into the time period, I became equally fascinated by the sense of exploration and wonder, combined with so much change during this time, and I thought a great deal about how this might have affected people in their day-to-day lives – and couldn’t help but see parallels to the last twenty years, with computers changing the way we all relate to and connect (or fail to connect) with each other. So that in the end The Glass Ocean is not only a novel about the sources of artistic inspiration, it is also a story about connection and disconnection, the loosening of ties within families and between individuals.

In the end though, of course every story is personal in some way, and for me, writing The Glass Ocean was a chance to indulge my own love of the sea and sea creatures. Growing up outside Boston in a family that made frequent visits to Cape Cod (my dad’s family are old Cape Codders from way back), I hoped in this novel to capture, or recapture, at least a little of my own childhood wonder and love of the ocean – something I am reminded of, again and again, whenever I look at the Blashckas’ mesmerizing glass creations.

About the Author:

Lori Baker is the author of three story collections, including Crazy Water: Six Fictions, which won the Mamdouha S. Bobst Literary Award for emerging writers. She has taught fiction writing, journalism, and composition at Brown University, Boston College, and Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. She lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island.

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