The 3 best books by Tracy Chevalier

In addition to his historical knowledge, Tracy chevalier He displays a human aftertaste in his novels. Every lover of History, I even dare to point out that every official historian must assume that aspect of intrahistory as the true driving force of our civilization. The flutter of the butterfly capable of changing the world, of transforming everything, The detail of the lives of anonymous characters becomes the fundamental support of human development in Tracy Chevalier's novels..

For it is not only about getting closer to the remote tapestry manufacturing techniques, but to the detail of how just one of them was made. What circumstances would the weaver be going through while making any tapestry that survived to this day?

It is only an example to get closer to the narrative style of the author. It is about that search for the sensory that we seem to intuit when we see a castle or a palace and we caress one of its centuries-old stones.

The success of the historical novel It is due, in my opinion, to that approach to what we were. Beyond the story of the specific battle, the more or less accurate count of victims of the Spanish plague, or the signing of a transcendental armistice, we always lack what is essential, what is personal, what is human.

Tracy Chevalier introduces us to that fascinating remote feeling, to sensations and emotions linked to its precise historical moment and the corresponding circumstances. It must be a matter of this American author's own fascination with History.

When he arrived from the United States and discovered the human wealth that exists in the world on the other side of the Atlantic, he would be convinced that he needed to write about what was officially narrated and about what is intuited, guessed and sensed when you truly touch what remains of his physique. from any remote past.

Top novels by Tracy Chevalier

The girl of the pearl

An enigmatic look from the 17th century. As suggestive or more than the Mona Lisa herself. While Da Vinci's famous wife remains hieratic, with hardly any expression, the young woman painted by Vermeer poses with her mouth half open, as if waiting to communicate something while her eyes reveal a point of discomfort or shyness. Her light, restrained or intimidated smile suggests various emotions surrounding indecipherable misfortunes or melancholies.

With a rich pictorial knowledge, Chevalier invites us to discover his truth in the setting of the Dutch people, of his market, of the painter's house.

The small as a point from which to watch the world go by while we immerse ourselves in a perfectly woven weave between the artistic and the sociological. A great little novel about one of those tricky paintings in art history.

The girl of the pearl

Fleeting angels

Just entered the XNUMXth century, the English said goodbye to their Queen Victoria. And the truth is that the farewell occurred as a clear allegory of the transition between tradition and modernity.

The characters who travel through this novel advance with the times, with the contradictions that the agreement between the customary and the avant-garde supposes that begins to encompass everything, the technological, the medical, the industrial..., until that moment in which it tries to become space also in the spiritual.

Chevalier adjusts to the times of the early twentieth century, a kind of century dotted with old beliefs and anticipation of revolutions and conflicts. The woman as a woman who seeks her space, the romanticism that re-emerges as a sensation associated with that millennium that points to its closure.

A novel of characters to approach the historical moment from different sides, a sum of perspectives that enrich the story, treated with rigor and adorned with the experiences of the Waterhouses or the Colemans, with their insurmountable differences and their need for understanding.

Fleeting angels

The lady and the unicorn

History is always presented to us with a romantic, fantastic point. The artistic representations of any era always contribute part of the imaginary that held beliefs to face tragedies and adversities or to bless crops and romances as soon as possible.

And if for this you had to rely on pagan representations, there was no problem. The tapestries of The Lady and the Unicorn conveyed something, no doubt, but no one knows how to decipher it with complete certainty.

The author proposes a journey between the tangible facts of the work and the most wonderful assumption about the cause of each symbol, the reasons for its execution ...

Nicolas des Innocents is the artist capable of great work, but he is also capable of admiring the glory of nature when it surpasses all manufacture with the intention of beauty. Jean Le Viste's daughter, who commissioned him to do the work, completely dupes him. So we do not immerse ourselves in impossible love stories, in melancholy and tragedies that destroy man but can generate the work of art.

The lady and the unicorn
5/5 - (8 votes)

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