I bought The Miniaturist by
Jessie Burton on my Kindle months ago then forgot about it. I’ve been stuck in
my former village in Mauritius with no WiFi so have been reading instead. This
book published in 2014 was the subject of a publishing bidding war at the
London Book Fair in 2013 and took over 4 years to write. The Miniaturist was
also awarded the Book of the Year award by Waterstones and Specavers. Not only
did this book come backed with a lot of awards, and hype but it also came with
one stellar front cover. But as the saying goes; never judge a book by its
cover….
To stalk what I read on Goodreads, click here.
The blurb:
"There is nothing hidden that will not be
revealed…"
On a brisk autumn day in 1686, eighteen-year-old
Nella Oortman arrives in Amsterdam to begin a new life as the wife of
illustrious merchant trader Johannes Brandt. But her new home, while
splendorous, is not welcoming. Johannes is kind yet distant, always locked in
his study or at his warehouse office-leaving Nella alone with his sister, the
sharp-tongued and forbidding Marin.
But Nella's world changes when Johannes presents
her with an extraordinary wedding gift: a cabinet-sized replica of their home.
To furnish her gift, Nella engages the services of a miniaturist-an elusive and
enigmatic artist whose tiny creations mirror their real-life counterparts in
eerie and unexpected ways . . .
Johannes' gift helps Nella to pierce the closed
world of the Brandt household. But as she uncovers its unusual secrets, she
begins to understand-and fear-the escalating dangers that await them all. In
this repressively pious society where gold is worshipped second only to God, to
be different is a threat to the moral fabric of society, and not even a man as
rich as Johannes is safe. Only one person seems to see the fate that awaits
them. Is the miniaturist the key to their salvation . . . or the architect of
their destruction?
Enchanting, beautiful, and exquisitely suspenseful,
The Miniaturist is a magnificent story of love and obsession, betrayal and
retribution, appearance and truth.
The short story is I read
this book in less than a day. Jessie Burton is a brilliant storyteller; she
drew me into this book in no time, and I got to the end and I was literally
like wtf; I don’t know what happened; a super anticlimax moment to what was a
great build up. It left me so damn confused!
Nella (Petronella), a young
18 year old arrives in Amsterdam to start her married life. In her new
household is her husband, her sister in law, a female maid and a black servant.
Once she arrives however she finds her
husband has no interest her. He gifts her bespoke dollhouse one that’s identical
to their home. To furnish it she hires the services of a miniaturist, and she
places an order for certain items. However she receives more than she asked for,
and these items she realises tells the future (which she realises after the
events have taken place). At first she’s scared but then she begins to takes
solace and looks forward to receiving more items. At some point she catches her
husband with another man and realises that his lack of interest in her is because
she’s the wrong gender, but she decides to stay anyway despite abhorring his
homosexuality. At the same time her husband is supposed to be selling sugar for
a frenemy that used to be in love with his sister but now married to someone
else, but for some strange reason he doesn’t want to sell it. Then he’s caught
in a homosexual act, accused, trialled, found guilty, sentenced to death. In
the meantime his unmarried sister is found to have been concealing a pregnancy,
has the baby, she dies after childbirth. We find out that the baby is the black
servant’s and not the frenemey’s as we were led to believe.
Nella’s character is a bit of
an odd one; you don’t really connect with her. She spends literally all of 15
minutes with her husband in the whole book, yet is strangely concerned about
him., her husband is gay at a time when being homosexual is punished by death
and he is openly having relationships without a care, everyone is obsessed with
sugar in this book, her husband doesn’t actually want to sell the sugar for
some unexplained reason.
And the main thing, we never
find anything out about the miniaturist. We don’t know how she knows anything
about the family, how she knows what will happen in the future (the miniatures
are sent before events unfold), why she sends the miniatures to Nella (or to
the other women that she sends them too, as we find out she does in the end). The
book is titled “The Miniaturist” yet we never find anything out about her.
Everything about her is left unexplained. We find out she was also called
Petronella. What is the significance of this? What’s the point of the dollhouse?
The whole book could have been written without the dollhouse to be perfectly
honest. The idea of the miniaturist was a redundant plot device that had no
real bearing on the story. It
feels like Jessie had a stroke of brilliance with this idea but then didn’t
know what to do with it, and 400 pages
later I don’t know either *throws hands in the air* .
So Jessie Burton is a great
storyteller, and I read this book within a day, but it was a damp squid by the
time I got to the end, and by then I was just confused and I had to Google it
because I thought I missed a chapter accidentally and asked a friend for clarification. So there.
Left confused by this review? That’s how this
book has made me feel! Have you read this book? Is it on your to read list?
Read anything awesome lately? Leave your recommendations below.
Thanks for sharing this awesome information
ReplyDelete