The Glass Ocean

by Lori Baker

A story of love, art, and obsession in Victorian England from debut novelist Lori Baker

The Glass Ocean is a story of becoming. Flamehaired, six-foot-two in stocking feet, newly orphaned Carlotta Dell’oro recounts the lives of her parents—solitary glassmaker Leopoldo Dell’oro and beautiful, unreachable Clotilde Girard—and discovers in their loves and losses, their omissions and obsessions, the circumstances of her abandonment and the weight of her inheritance. With a master artisan’s patience and exquisite craft, debut novelist Lori Baker has created a gemlike Victorian world, a place where mistakes of the past reappear in the future, art can destroy, and family is not to be trusted.

Leopoldo and Clotilde meet in 1841 aboard the Narcissus, on an expedition led by Clotilde’s magnanimous, adventuring father. It’s Leopoldo’s task to document the animals of the high sea, and by his skilled hand the drawings become the only record of these secretive creatures’ existence. But what possesses his mind is golden Clotilde, and soon his papers fill with images of her, beginning a devotion that will prove inescapable. Clotilde meanwhile sees only her dear papa, but when he goes missing she is pushed to Leopoldo, returning with him to the craggy English shores of Whitby, the place to which Leopoldo vowed he would never return.

There they form an uneasy coexistence, lost  to each other. Clotilde asks only for her papa, and Leopoldo turns to town, where he finds himself in the employ of a local glassblower. There, he begins to conceive his newest project: transforming his sketches into glass, blowing life and light into the darkest creatures. But in finding his art he surrenders Clotilde, and the distance between the two is only confirmed by the birth of baby Carlotta.

Years have passed and Carlotta is now grown. A friend from the past comes to Whitby and with his arrival sets in motion the Dell’oros’ inevitable disintegration. Soon Carlotta is left alone to determine the course of her future, though perhaps it is written already. In hypnotic, inimitable prose Lori Baker’s The Glass Ocean transforms a story of family into something as otherworldly and mesmerizing as life beneath the sea itself.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Historical, Audiobook, 19th Century, Book Club, British Literature

352 pages, Hardcover

First published July 26, 2013

About the author

Lori Baker's books include a novel, The Glass Ocean, and three short story collections, Crash & Tell: Stories, Crazy Water: Six Fictions, and Scraps. She has taught writing at Brown University, Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, and Boston College. She lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island.

Reviews

[Lolly K Dandeneau · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I began reading this story I was barely trudging through and then the appearance of gems, which I plucked, in the form of sentences that suddenly changed the tone of the entire book for me. This strange novel pulled me in and it was a slow bleed.

First, I have to address the feelings of frustration other reviewers mention over the slow, muddled beginning. You have to adjust to the writing, much as one would a poem. The language is beautiful but most of us don't prance about speaking like this, "Carlotta Dell'oro is my name;I am eighteen years old; mother I have none; father either." It doesn't continue in this vein, and at times the writing is repetitive but I still enjoyed it. One must remember it is a different time period. Once I got to the meat of the story, everything changed and I started to care about Carlotta. This is a strange book that reads with a dreamlike quality, it isn't focused so much on how she is an orphan and thank God for that, it is more a disembowelment of her parents marriage. "The problem is they should not have met at all, at sea or anywhere else,neither on a street nor in a room,in a field, on a beach, he and she, Leo and Clotilde, two opposing elements that should have repelled, resisted; that did repel, resist, for a time; that still resist me, at any rate. The two of them, unmeant; of emphatically disparate stuff. Until brought together. A collision, I the result. And then once again: the molecules fly apart, will not hold." That beautifully explained her parents tragic fate together.
The saddest part of the story is how two parents can be so lost, damaged by fate or their choices, that they fail to remember their child is a person, not a 'thing' as Clotilde calls her. This sentence alone packs a punch, "As for me, I'm growing up in the gap between their two secret, separate worlds-at the juncture of their mutually averted eyes.".

Of her selfish, vain and yet deeply sad mother, 'She inhabits insubstantiality, makes ghosts of us all.'

'This is the effect of my mother's presence, which is really an absence.'

Well written are the moments of her mother's unwanted pregnancy, where our narrator clings tenaciously to her cold mother's reluctant womb. "The only way to get rid of me will be to get rid of herself. And my mother is much too conceited for that. A world without Clotilde is an inconceivable world."
About her father, absorbed in his glass making, blind to her mother's unhappiness "Because I'm bearing down on his life too. Not just hers. Bearing down like a steam engine. And I'm going to arrive, whether he opens his eyes or not". And yes, dear reader, Leo will irritate you with his withdrawal,cowardice and voluntary blindness.
Poor Carlotta, doomed already from the womb. I found myself absolutely hating her mother Clotilde, regardless of the handy excuse that she was so broken by the loss of her own father. I didn't feel much sympathy for her. And Carlotta's father Leo was much like a sea creature himself, hiding in his shell when really he should have stood up for himself, or at least showed his true feelings. But, as she tells us, Leo is a man that hates looking at his own failures and secrets, even as they haunt him.
And Thomas... the poison that enters their already fractured lives, he just made me think of some crypt keeper and really, maybe Clotilde did deserve what she got out of him. A man that seems dusty and rotten to the core, though I can't pin down why. I began to feel like I knew them, the sort of characters you would cross the street to avoid.
Both parents lost to the sea in one way or another, parents who were never really concrete for Carlotta, I half wished for an ending where she just said 'Well to hell with you both!' and gave them nary a thought.
I can see from my review I am still caught in the sticky substance of Baker's writing. It is different, and it takes a bit of time for the reader to adjust to the flow. Well worth my time. Baker did a beautiful job exposing each character, to the bone of their ugliness too. This strange novel is staying with me for a while. It has Victorian feel, and I think it would translate well into a film. Read it.

[Annie · Rating 5 out of 5]

POSSIBLE SPOILERS!

Seductive prose that reflects the themes and conceits of the novel. The ocean, in the rhythms its tides and currents and strange depths is turned into flowing language and cadences. Somehow, Lori Baker also manages to marry art and science in her language: at times the poetic and dreamlike language becomes analytical, almost taxonomic, such as in the long lists that appear on a page. Beautiful synchronicity of style and theme.
I loved the settings of the ship of scientific endeavour in the 1840s ploughing the waves in exotic climes, then the return to cold and claustrophobic Victorian Whitby, with its narrow, twisting steepnesses and the cold, dark torrent flowing beneath the Birdcage. (Birdcage - prison? sanctuary? So much that one could unpick and write about in this novel!)
I was aware that I didn't really like either of the two main characters, Leo or Clotilde. But this did not seem to impede my enthusiasm for the book. Leo's obsession with Clotilde painted shades of Wuthering Heights for me, in the doomed obsession of Heathcliff with Cathy.
Does the bold and arresting decision to go with Carlotta as first-person narrator entirely work? She is not present - cannot be, as she is not yet born - for most of the events described. She haunts the book, like a ghost from the future. Very effective, but, on first reading at least, I'm not sure it is 100% consistent. But it might be! Does anyone have any thoughts? I'd love to hear them.
Life is laid bare here, viewed as under a microscope. The internal workings of the human heart are exposed, examined and exhibited like specimens in a bell-jar or butterflies on a pin-board.

[Valentina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has to be one of the most beautifully written books I’ve read so far this year. The prose’s lushness left me stunned many times, and the story itself is delicately written.
I loved the way the story was told, with the narrator weaving the plot along, almost making it happen as she imagines it. There were so many fabulous details of the Victorian period, including details to do with ships and seafaring, that the reader really felt immersed in the age. The story is like an old, kind of worn piece of lace that is lightly yellowing, intricate and pungent.
The characters, especially Clotilde, are fascinating. The author manages to bring them to life in such a way that they are never overwhelmed by the atmosphere or the details. This is not easy to achieve in such an elaborate novel as this one is. Characters usually fall by the wayside when details are so strong and the Gothic atmosphere is so rich, so I was so glad to find that it was not the case in this one.
If you love literary fiction, historical fiction, or both, and enjoy gorgeous writing, then I highly recommend this one.

[Erica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps one of best and smartest books I've read -- the quality of the writing is amazing and the narrative shook me. Carlotta is trying to find her way in the face of being abandoned by both her mother and her father, and to understand their obsessions, their reasons for doing something so unthinkable. She is an empathic narrator (she has empathy) even to the point where she tries to understand the actions that hurt her to the core. Even more to the point is the wonder of the world she describes -- the sea voyage, glassmaking, the world of Victorian naturalists; and then the magical world that glimmers just beyond. This book requires attentive reading. A friend of mine who gave me the book told me that she read it twice -- and she got more out of the book the second time through. I read it twice as well, and figure I'll go back for a third reading. There's so much layered into this book, doublings of various sorts, the book works like a really complex piece of music, with themes and motifs building off one another, little clues dropped in in one context that come to mean so much more later. Leo's secret project, alluded to at various points, being the making of a glass Clotilde -- stopping time in its track, stopping life and love in its tracks, is something I had not guessed at, but which seemed so right, and it gave this book a powerful sense of emotional conclusion (or near conclusion). Carlotta's seeing that glass finger in the last chapter -- a remnant of that project she saw in Leo's studio/shed, for only a moment, makes her search for her parents all the more meaningful, and disturbingly beautiful. This is not an easy book, or a quick read. This is truly a book of serious literature, a rare bird, but a gorgeous one.

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an exquisite and harrowing work of literary fiction. So many images and passages will stay with me. I grew to care deeply for each of the three main characters – the heartbreaking narrator and her two exceptional parents – even when I did not always like what they did. I found myself marveling at the beautiful quality and control of language – on par with the best lyrical fiction — and the remarkably rich sensory world. I have to say that Lori Baker's ability to bring art and science to life made this book a particular favorite. This is one of those rare books where I was emotionally spent when I finished – it was a truly beautiful and cathartic experience.

[Maddie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received a copy of this book through a Goodreads giveaway.

The beginning of this novel began slowly for me. At first, I had to push myself to keep reading a little bit every night, until finally the story picked up in the second section. After that, I found the book to be a wonderful escape - I could very easily place myself in the world Lori Baker created around the lives of several tragic characters. The middle of the book, for me, was fast reading, and thoroughly enjoyable. The end slowed down a bit again, but was nonetheless essential to the telling of the story.

The characters are certainly odd in a very good way. I grew to despise Clotilde - her characterization is fantastic in that it made it very easy to hate her. Leo, again, is characterized well, along with Thomas Argument and William Cloverdale. Harry Owen is, at times, difficult to get a strong sense of, as well as Carlotta, the narrator. However, each character is interesting... each character is obviously a flawed being in their constant obsessions and longings, which make them unique literary specimens.

The language is beautiful and poetic, which I appreciated, but I could see how it would make other readers impatient. Baker's novel is literary in the sense that the description of simple scenes is detailed and the crafting of language is artistic rather than solely entertaining.

I would recommend this book, but be cautioned that not everything in the novel makes perfect sense. I had to get over my desire for things to make sense in order to really enjoy the novel. Once I expected that some things wouldn't be logical, I tended to understand a little better, which made it a different, interesting read.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book employs lush poetic language. I would go so far as to say that the rhythms of language are central to the characterizations and setting of the book. The author's work with phrasing, with the momentum of clauses within a sentence and how they conjure an atmosphere, era, and person was a great pleasure for me, though I would acknowledge that for those readers who want a more plot-driven novel, this style might be discomfiting.

It's clear that an enormous amount of research went into the writing: Victorian science and craftwork, travel narratives, and details of attire and furnishing all seem precisely depicted, but Baker manages this without creating a phony or strained diction (and I say this as an avid reader of Victorian novels). She has the ability to see and hear a distant world, despite its hardships, as beautiful, spooky, and funny (as sticky door is "disinclined").

The Glass Ocean is a novel that is best read slowly. One should savor the texture of the novel's language as intrinsic to its meaning, its tonal shifts--and through that means the very human characters make their way into the reader's sensibility and linger in mind.

[janet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating story based on quirky, obsessive real people. The point of view was bizarre--inconsistent--the narrator speaks from the POV of an unborn child who somehow can see everything about her parents' lives and be inside their minds before she was even conceived. That was hard to take, but the characters are portrayed with passion and subtlety. I'd put it halfway into the magical realism genre, but also squarely into historical fiction with gorgeous period detail.

[Lissa00 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a slow book. One that allows the beauty of the language to tell the story without giving too much away. Carlotta is an orphan that creates the story of her parents as she tells it, imagining what they would have felt or said or done. Although a sad story, it is beautifully written and one that I am very glad to have immersed myself in. This was a Goodreads Giveaway.

[Pierre · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like to read challenging books -- but ones that also have an emotional center. The Glass Ocean is definitely a challenging and deeply emotion-filled book -- pulsating language, descriptions of a world that is delicious in its specificity, and characters so raw I wanted to wrap them in my arms. I kept trying not to blink so as to take the book in all at once, like a work of visual art -- the scale pushes beyond that capacity, but still, the more I read in one sitting the better. The reviews here seem to break down into two groups -- those who can't get into the book's rhythms, those who do. I'm all in -- this is a gorgeous, intelligent novel, well worth the effort, well worth the giving over of all expectations.

[Paula · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can count on the fingers of my two hands the number of books of true literature I've read that were first published since 2000 -- and this is one of them. Baker has a keen ear for the sentence, for rhythm, and how that rhythm solidifies the content. She is a materialist -- making the words convey through their sense of sound as well as through their sense of meaning. This skill and attention is rare in any era, but at this point something of a lost art. I'd read her just for that ability alone, but then the story is also rich, complex, and altogether emotionally hair-raising. In four chapters, the first three of like length ( about one hundred pages each) and the fourth more a coda (10 pages), The Glass Ocean reminds me of a composition for a small chamber ensemble.

[Barney · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is hope for new literary commercial fiction. This book links poetry to fiction -- the language is so sure and brilliant, the music so finely calibrated, that there's a spell cast -- my spine goes tingly. The book cover is a bit of a head-scratcher -- this is NOT a romance novel; it is, rather, in the tradition of Joyce, Beckett, Woolf.

[Linda · Rating 1 out of 5]

I gave up on this slow going book. It's dream like quality was too repetitive. The opening was captivating but it was down hill by page 50 and by age 100 I just could not take it any more. This was a pre-published edition I was reading for my library so I am glad I did not pay for this book.

[Erica Grossman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really amazing story about a young woman who has grown up with parents who are too absorbed to care for her, about her, and eventually no longer literally there for her. Reading this was painful, but incredible -- psychologically riveting.

[Marisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unfortunately, I’m part of the camp that finds this book tedious and so purple it leaves artificial grape flavoring as a permanent stain inside my throat. Lori Baker is a hell of a writer, but poetry in its purest form is probably more her speed than this novel. It’s a cool concept, and I wish I’d been able to last longer, but there’s so much muddy prose hidden within the poetic style that it’s incredibly difficult to follow. This novel, for me, is one I’ve ditched and will be passing on to my neighborhood’s little free library.

[Cecily Black · Rating 1 out of 5]

picked this up book up for a challenge. I really was not optimistic going in because historical fiction is not genre I generally enjoy.
I had read a few reviews before I started the book and I heard that it is a slow start so I really wanted to give it a chance but unfortunately I still could not really get into it.
I probably wouldn't recommend this book to anybody else because I probably won't remember it long term.
meh

[Marina Chen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book I read voraciously and rapidly, but that in no way diminished my enjoyment of it. The Glass Ocean tells the tale of Carlotta Dell'oro, a young woman, who narrates in retrospect her parents' relationship, their family life, and separation.
This book's singular, period-appropriate style and format made the entire story nostalgic and dreamlike. Lori Baker, author, creates a moving storyline with repeated significant phrases and especially brilliant imagery, drawing readers into the seaside cottage bathing in sunlight.
It does take a while to get "into" the book, and the first few pages can be very confusing--a character is introduced, and we don't learn how the two are related until the very end. Their relationship is not a "big reveal," either, so it was confusing why the author made it so. In addition, the writing itself can be confusing.
Insecurity and jealousy, the antagonist, hides behind many faces depending on the character, and there is not one pinpoint-able conflict: Carlotta's parents meet and fall in love, a beautiful thing, but from first sight their relationship is already deteriorating. But within tangles of conflict, a dreamlike, worthwhile story emerges.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

This quiet story is as elegant as the glass Carlotta's father makes. A book full of dusty curiosities and specimens, it's about what it means to long for a missing parent, to try to understand one's parents, and how a lack of such understanding can impact the next generation. Read this one to savor the language.

[Susan V · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't read this. I got lost at sea with this overly wordy novel. The plot is hidden in too much poetic fluff. I enjoy description but the authors word choice and usage weighs down what there could be of a story, unfortunately I could not connect with the characters.

[Jiji · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I've read this year. Lot of sadness here, but also many wonders. Took me quite a few hours to read, but I was unable to put it down. And then I cried a bit...

[Kathryn]

The cover of this book is interesting. I can't wait to get this book! I won this book
and I am looking forward to reading it. Yea!

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written book; much imagery and colorful prose. Sad story of how people can ignore the ones they love in everyday life and yet love them in their hearts. Tragic!

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely loved this book. Written in a poetic style. I liked it much more than the people in my book discussion group.

[Chris Huls · Rating 2 out of 5]

A DNF for me. I could not get into this book. I could not get past the author’s writing style.

[Guylou (Two Dogs and a Book) · Rating 1 out of 5]

Last year, I received a copy of The Glass Ocean from Penguin Canada in exchange for an honest review. I am a bit late to write it since the book was published on August 1st 2013.

This was a very hard read... slow and painfully repetitive.

The entire story can be contained in about 20 pages, but was stretched to breaking point by constant repetitions. The repetitive writing style dragged the story and besought me to quit reading that book over and over. I persisted because of my stubbornness and finally saw the end of it; however I don't have much to say about it.

All the characters had major flaws and none stood out as likable. Some scenes in the book were interesting (i.e. the green cloud storm, the mechanical woman looking like Clotilde), but were so few and far between.

I hate giving such a low rating to any books, but this book did not have the substance for giving it more than one star.

[Rhonda · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't care for this story. There wasn't much in the way of character development and little or no dialogue. I was constantly wondering why? Why did the father leave his family? Why was he hunting for his sister? I found reading it rather dull. The main character had little presence in the book except as a narrator of things prior to her birth. Even after she becomes part of the cast of characters there's little to tell who she is. Continuity is haphazard at best..invisible at worst.

It left me as if it was a strange dream I'd had...with nothing I could describe afterwards. Rather a waste of my reading time.

[Janet · Rating 2 out of 5]

A dysfunctional victorian family - for me to love a book I have to really connect with a character and that didn't happen for me. The narrator is an orphaned girl that tells the story of her parents' lives even before she was born. All of the characters have an emptiness about them and they all deal with their disappointments in sad destructive ways. The writing is beautifully descriptive and I guess that is what seems a bit disjointed and unsettling while reading the book. The language of the story is so beautiful but the story and characters are so full of hurt and self-destruction the language almost feels wasted on the characters.

[Vicki · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't even know if I can provide a review for this book as I didn't finish it. What I did read (I gave up around page 105) was confusing. I have no idea who Carlotta is or why she was telling this story as neither was interesting enough to hold my interest. Admittedly, this wasn't my type of book to begin with and I tried to like it but it felt like something I would be forced to read in high school. Or an Oprah's pick.

I won this book through Goodreads First Reads.

[Darcy Bell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cannot believe how good this book was. I was so amazed by the music of the sentences, and by the depth of emotions that built up. What was up with the book cover? This book is more in line with the blurbs from Banville and Pynchon than with the romance riff of the design. Indeed, it seems almost more an anti-romance. Heartbreaking, beautiful...

[Steve]

Thomas Pynchon sez: "An adventure of dreamlike momentum and romantic intensity, brought alive by a storyteller with uncanny access to the Victorians, not only to the closely-woven texture of their days but also to the dangerous nocturnal fires being attended to in their hearts."