The lady and the unicorn

Tracy Chevalier
Ed. Penguin, 2005

Last step of my reading reporting countdown. I found it in the library of the EOI while I was looking up something more interesting to read in English that graded books (suited to the level of each learner), so much simplified that they usually lost most of their appeal. Some years ago I read another book of the same author, The Virgin Blue, I liked a lot, so it seemed to me a good idea to try now to read her in English. She became really wellknown because the film adaptation of her book Girl with a pearl earring, with Scarlett Johansson as the painted girl and Collin Firth playing Vermeer.  

The novel tell us the story of the creation of a medieval tapestry, the so called The lady and the unicorn. A young Parisian painter, Nicolas des Innocents, is commissioned by the powerful nobleman, Jean le Viste, to design the cartoons of a group of tapestries he wanted to hang on his house to impress his guests and reinforce his status as minister of the french king. The topic of the tapestries shoud be battle scenes alledgely won by his family, showing his courage and manhood. But Nicolas is persuaded by le Viste's wife, Geneviève, to draw a softer subject: the taming of an unicorn by a noblewoman. Following his lascivious nature, Nicolas is inmediately drawn by le Viste's daughter, Claude. As a result he subtlely focuses his designs in the sexual myth of the unicorn and depicts the chase and embrace by two beatiful women, a noblewoman and her made,  of its rampant horn. The resemblance of these fine women with Geneviève and Claude is so clear that le Viste's merchant, Leon le Vieux, the man in charge of providing initial money and materials and making sure the work gets done, sends Nicolas to Brussels to check the weaving work and to get him as far as possible from le Viste's daughter. In Brussels Nicolas will meet master weaver Georges de la Chapelle and his family.

In the begining I thought that all the plot was an invention of the author, but the lively and precise descriptions of the tapestries made me suspect and I decided to look up in the Internet and for my surprise I discovered that those tapestries were not only real but quite famous indeed. It was totally amazing to be reading all the cartoons designing and tapestry weaving processes while I had the images of them in my computer screen. 

The book has no a main character but a handfull of them and each chapter it is told by one of them. This trick gives the story a point of dynamism that catches reader's attention, but it makes also more dificult to the writer to fully develop so many characters in so little space, taken into account that the book's spare is only 250-pages length. 

What I have liked most from the book is the reconstruction of dairy live in a weaver workshop in the 15th century in Flanders: the stench of the blue-dyers due to the use of urine in the dying process, their compulsory exile to the outskirts of all cities, how the tapestries were weaven back to front and so the need of cartoons with mirror images of the final draw, the working rules of the guilds... Less fortunate it has been in this case the author's try of supplying her caractheristic eroctic sensibility to the story: most of the erotic scenes have seemed to me to be out of place, settle down in the plot by force.

Although the book is not particulary abundant in remarkable sentences like in the big literary works, I have still found some, like: "I have always liked to look at the Seine, it holds out the promise of scape".