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<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was the horror of love: your sweetheart could stick a knife into your eyeball and sharpen it a notch every chance they got.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Mari is the jeweller of the title: she has a stall in the market of a small coastal town where she sells second-hand jewellery, pieces bought at auction or finding their way to her by other means, and which \u201cafter years of being longed for, loved and flaunted by other owners, \u2026 shared Mari\u2019s company for a while before finding a new home.\u201d The jewels are not just cast-off trinkets, but have a life of their own as they pass from one owner to the next; similarly, Mari is not simply an eccentric hawker, but has a secret hidden away in \u201cthe shroud of a sheet that kept it clear of cold and dust\u201d: little by little, in the privacy of her home, Mari is working on an uncut emerald, \u201ca chip of grave-cloth green\u201d with which she feels an intimate connection, and which offers a superb subtext. At the heart of the emerald is a unique feature that could be the key to its brilliance, but the work needed to bring it to the surface must be carried out delicately and expertly: one false move and it could shatter and be irreparably ruined. This is a subtle metaphor for Mari\u2019s own life, which is revealed to us little by little in the course of the narrative, layers of brittle carapace slowly chipped away until the aching heart is exposed. It could, however, also stand as a metaphor for the book itself, which manages to be both tense and languorous, its sudden bursts of raw beauty mirroring Mari\u2019s intermittent urges to work furiously on the emerald, and its drawing back at the moments of greatest drama echoing the way in which Mari wraps up the emerald and hides it away, leaving it to throb gently just at the edges of her awareness. The writing in the translation is superb: like Mari’s handling of the emerald, aware that \u201cnothing should obscure the light\u2019s journey through the gemstone\u201d, Davies allows nothing to obscure the opalescent beauty of Lewis\u2019s prose:<\/p>\n
\u201cBut we shouldn\u2019t be afraid of beauty, should we?
\nSince possessing the stone, Mari had struggled to admire it without wanting to cut it. To open in it just the smallest window. But yes, of course such gorgeous gems can trick you. She\u2019d heard of jewellers sent insane by knowing a stone\u2019s face as incisively as they did their own. They\u2019d put all their faith in it. Been led to believe they had the key to every cell. That it was rock solid. But they\u2019d take up their tools and it would flake to powder just the same. Leaving the memory of that germ of beauty.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\nMari is a private, taciturn character, and it is a feat of both Lewis\u2019s storytelling and Davies\u2019s translation that we are allowed such intimacy with her. We learn of the strained relationship with her father, the local reverend, full of divine love for others but brutal to Mari: \u201cHe had been her life. He\u2019d tried diverting her ardour to loftier heroes. But an ordinary father\u2019s love would have been enough. He\u2019d been kind to so many people, impatient with others, even cruel to a few. He was only a man, after all.\u201d The confidence and compassion to which we are invited is aided by the excellent supporting cast, whose relationship to Mari crystallises slowly as the story progresses. We meet her fellow market workers, and follow their routines and relationships as this small community faces the closure of the market, their slow life overtaken by industrialisation. As well as the human characters, we also encounter Mari\u2019s pet monkey, Nanw, who lives in a cage in Mari\u2019s bedroom but whose backstory is unclear. The only part of the narrative that I was strangely unmoved by, though, was a key moment between Mari and Nanw in the roiling sea that had been lapping at the edges of the story throughout; I struggled to get beyond a fairly basic interpretation of Nanw as a surrogate family member, and would be interested to know how others have read this relationship.<\/p>\n
As well as her stall at the market, Mari intermittently earns money helping her friend Mo to clear out the houses of people who have died with no next of kin to take care of their belongings. From each house Mari rescues a photograph which she frames and displays on her mantelpiece, rescuing from loneliness and obscurity people she never encountered in life, and surrounding herself with the lives of the dead. This is no quirky macabre obsession: Mari is searching for something, and when the revelation of what this was came, I was completely blindsided: it was a stroke of brilliance, and of wonderful storytelling. Often the phrase \u201cit took my breath away\u201d is an overstatement, but not in this case. You\u2019ll know by now that I don\u2019t do spoilers, so no more on that \u2013 but I highly recommend that you read and experience it for yourself.<\/p>\n
Review copy of\u00a0<\/em>The Jeweller provided by Honno Press<\/em><\/p>\n
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Translated from Welsh by Gwen Davies, Honno Press (2019) When I received The Jeweller, I was shocked to realise it\u2019s the first book I\u2019ve ever read translated from Welsh. I\u2019ve read books by Welsh authors written in English (most recently, the wonderful Pigeon by Alys Conran, published by Parthian Books), but never anything originally written […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2429,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[183,391,419,939,1045,1055],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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