Book: The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier

Found my self blushed quite a lot when reading this one. Unlike her other books (so far I’ve read: Girl with A Pearl Earring and The Virgin Blue) that usually handed us love scenes with more subtle and delicate ways, I found The Lady and the Unicorn explored “new” territory with more details. Not that I mind ;-p

Because come to think of it, in my opinion, the book voiced a lot about the human senses: sight, touch, taste, smell and sound—and not just because the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries themselves were named after these five senses. What better way to fairly put them in the story rather than exploiting them in its paragraphs?

Inspired by the beautiful (at least from the pictures, cause I haven’t saw it first handily) 5th century French tapestries, this book gave a story told by its characters’ point of views: the lady killer painter (Nicolas des Innocents) who created the tapestries’ designs, the nobleman (Jean Le Viste) and his family who hired the painter, the weaver (Georges de la Chapelle) and his family, Georges’ cartoonist (Philippe de la Tour), etc.

The plot was simple: the process of making the famous six tapestries, but what I love about Chevalier is: she can make a simple plot into intriguing story!

Before you know it, you’ll be making decisions on whose point of view that you like and whose that you’ll be dreading. Well, at least that’s what I did ;-) I enjoyed reading Philippe’s and Nicolas’ parts—reading the story from characters that have opposite personalities was so much fun, especially when “watching” them pursuing the same girl.

My favorite tapestry among the six was Touch. There’s something majestic and graceful about the lady in it, and I prefer her than the other ladies, they either too melancholy smiling their sad smiles, or too innocently young for my eyes.

Image source: http://www.tchevalier.com/unicorn/index.html

As I always do after reading Chevalier’s work, I also had fun browsing around for the historical background of this book: the weaving process, all about that century’s weavers, the tapestry patterns that century usually produced, etc. If you enjoy her books before, you’ll definitely fall in love again with this one.

Strongly agree with the Independent’s comment about this book: “Tracy Chevalier gives the kiss of life to the historical novel.”

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Published: January 2007, PT Gramedia Pustaka Utama Writer: Tracy Chevalier Translator: Pepi Smith Indonesian Title: Lady dan Unicorn Volume: 296 pages