I lead off with embarrassment, as ever, for my neglect of
this blog, a constant millstone – an apt metaphor given the crisis point of the
novel – around my neck. In my defense, I’m trying to move house, so I’m a bit
busy. For the plaintiff, I’m never really that
busy and could probably have caught up to date if I hadn’t chosen to play
Minecraft with my son or watch GoT in my spare time instead. C’est la vie, such
as it is.
So, here goes a pretty longshot review, without the benefit
of the original text to which to refer, and with little or no enthusiasm for the book itself.
The gist here is that some provincial bumpkin with a strong
family name but no cash to match gets picked to be the wife of an apparently
wealthy Amsterdam businessman and adventurer (both in the literal sense of
loving travel and exploration and the figurative and, in Holland at least,
heathen and perverted sexual sense), and moves to live with him and his sister,
a seemingly cold would-be dowager with her own dark secret, perhaps.
But it’s all a sham.
Through the strength of her character (imagine I laugh at
this point), and also because she’s bored and neglected, she pries open the
family closet and extracts secret after secret, about the inscrutable Surinamese
servant Otto, about sister Marin and her own tortured soul, about DH Johannes, shocking
herself anew each time, whilst in the background a mysterious maker of
miniature furniture and figurines sends her piece after piece to inhabit her
large dolls house, a wedding present from her absentee husband.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fun read, if a bit sigh-worthy in
places, given the context of religiously-intolerant 17th century Amsterdam.
Burton’s language feels awfully modern however and I just didn’t care enough
about any of the characters to really feel their plight. Sure, whipping the old
racist and puritanical Protestant Dutch trope into a suspenseful thriller is a
new one for me, but then I wanted a lot more from the mystery of the
miniaturist. That particular storyline, the titular one at that, fizzles out disappointingly
and makes one wonder what was the point of it all – it’s more a device that has
been stretched and stretched past its useful elasticity.
I could see this one winning a Richard and Judy book prize*, and
as such it probably has or had immense popular appeal, but for that very
reason, and quite a few others, it’s not for me.
Not at all.
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