- Paperback: 240 pages
- Publisher: Dutton (Dec 30 1999)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 052594527X
- ISBN-13: 978-0525945277
- Product Dimensions: 20.6 x 14 x 2.5 cm
- Shipping Weight: 318 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (667 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,125,349 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
With precisely 35 canvases to his credit, the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer represents one of the great enigmas of 17th-century art. The meager facts of his biography have been gleaned from a handful of legal documents. Yet Vermeer's extraordinary paintings of domestic life, with their subtle play of light and texture, have come to define the Dutch golden age. His portrait of the anonymous Girl with a Pearl Earring has exerted a particular fascination for centuries--and it is this magnetic painting that lies at the heart of Tracy Chevalier's second novel of the same title.
Girl with a Pearl Earring centers on Vermeer's prosperous Delft household during the 1660s. When Griet, the novel's quietly perceptive heroine, is hired as a servant, turmoil follows. First, the 16-year-old narrator becomes increasingly intimate with her master. Then Vermeer employs her as his assistant--and ultimately has Griet sit for him as a model. Chevalier vividly evokes the complex domestic tensions of the household, ruled over by the painter's jealous, eternally pregnant wife and his taciturn mother-in-law. At times the relationship between servant and master seems a little anachronistic. Still, Girl with a Pearl Earring does contain a final delicious twist.
Throughout, Chevalier cultivates a limpid, painstakingly observed style, whose exactitude is an effective homage to the painter himself. Even Griet's most humdrum duties take on a high if unobtrusive gloss:
I came to love grinding the things he brought from the apothecary--bones, white lead, madder, massicot--to see how bright and pure I could get the colors. I learned that the finer the materials were ground, the deeper the color. From rough, dull grains madder became a fine bright red powder and, mixed with linseed oil, a sparkling paint. Making it and the other colors was magical.In assembling such quotidian particulars, the author acknowledges her debt to Simon Schama's classic study The Embarrassment of Riches. Her novel also joins a crop of recent, painterly fictions, including Deborah Moggach's Tulip Fever and Susan Vreeland's Girl in Hyacinth Blue. Can novelists extract much more from the Dutch golden age? The question is an open one--but in the meantime, Girl with a Pearl Earring remains a fascinating piece of speculative historical fiction, and an appealingly new take on an old master. --Jerry Brotton
From Publishers Weekly
The scant confirmed facts about the life of Vermeer, and the relative paucity of his masterworks, continues to be provoke to the literary imagination, as witnessed by this third fine fictional work on the Dutch artist in the space of 13 months. Not as erotic or as deviously suspenseful as Katharine Weber's The Music Lesson, or as original in conception as Susan Vreeland's interlinked short stories, Girl in Hyacinth Blue, Chevalier's first novel succeeds on its own merits. Through the eyes of its protagonist, the modest daughter of a tile maker who in 1664 is forced to work as a maid in the Vermeer household because her father has gone blind, Chevalier presents a marvelously textured picture of 17th-century Delft. The physical appearance of the city is clearly delineated, as is its rigidly defined class system, the grinding poverty of the working people and the prejudice against Catholics among the Protestant majority. From the very first, 16-year-old narrator Griet establishes herself as a keen observer who sees the world in sensuous images, expressed in precise and luminous prose. Through her vision, the personalities of coolly distant Vermeer, his emotionally volatile wife, Catharina, his sharp-eyed and benevolently powerful mother-in-law, Maria Thins, and his increasing brood of children are traced with subtle shading, and the strains and jealousies within the household potently conveyed. With equal skill, Chevalier describes the components of a painting: how colors are mixed from apothecary materials, how the composition of a work is achieved with painstaking care. She also excels in conveying the inflexible class system, making it clear that to members of the wealthy elite, every member of the servant class is expendable. Griet is almost ruined when Vermeer, impressed by her instinctive grasp of color and composition, secretly makes her his assistant, and later demands that she pose for him wearing Catharina's pearl earrings. While Chevalier develops the tension of this situation with skill, several other devices threaten to rob the narrative of its credibility. Griet's ability to suggest to Vermeer how to improve a painting demands one stretch of the reader's imagination. And Vermeer's acknowledgment of his debt to her, revealed in the denouement, is a blatant nod to sentimentality. Still, this is a completely absorbing story with enough historical authenticity and artistic intuition to mark Chevalier as a talented newcomer to the literary scene. Agent, Deborah Schneider.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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First Sentence
My mother did not tell me they were coming. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
My mother did not tell me they were coming. Read the first page
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Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great book but poorly read,
By
This review is from: Girl with a Pearl Earring (Audio CD)
I just finished listening to the novel on CD read by Jenna Lamia. Avoid it. The reader tries to put on accents for every different character and fails horribly. Her accent for Vermeer is most ridiculous of all and it takes away from the novel terribly. The only well created accent is Griet's; that's not a compliment considering the many characters in this excellent novel. Read the book but avoid this particular CD version.
4.0 out of 5 stars
great book,
By
This review is from: Girl With a Pearl Earring: A Novel (Paperback)
This novel tells the story of a young Dutch girl during the 17th century. The 16 year old daughter of a tile painter becomes a maid in the household of Johannes Vermeer to help support her family. Each day she must tend to the laundry and keep up with the housework for a condescending mistress and uncivil maids. She finds enjoyment only when she cleans her master's studio where she witnesses the creative process of his work and where she is also drawn into his private world. Their growing intimacy spreads disruption and jealousy within the household.This is an absorbing story, utterly convincing, you will get an image of what Vermeer may have been like. The novel is full of emotions making it a most engaging read, I loved it.
5.0 out of 5 stars
flows in smooth strokes!,
By paula b "paula" (surrey, england!) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Girl With a Pearl Earring: A Novel (Paperback)
i have never seen the film, so my mind was completely open to the literaries, this book was one of the most pleasant and smoothly worded books i have read for a long time.the descriptives were beautiful, the period elegantly evoked, and the artistic brushstrokes flowed wonderfully, thoroughly enjoyed this, read in about three days whilst chillin in the glorious summer sunshine!
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