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Loading... Girl with a Pearl Earringby Tracy Chevalier
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. In this coming-of-age story, Griet, a sixteen year-old girl is hired as a maid by the famous Dutch artist, Johannes Vermeer in the seventeenth century. Vermeer, fascinated by Griet, captures her in his famous painting of the same name. The story is told by Griet over the course of two years, and stresses the strict social order of the time. A friend recommended this book to me a few years ago and I am still talking about it. I have referred to it as teachers and I collaborated on a novel study of Chasing Vermeer and the sequel The Wright 3, both by Blue Balliett. garrity | Jun 19, 2009 |   Interesting and well written novel about the relationship between a maid and the painter Vermeer. There were a couple of plot points that I didn't think rang true, but otherwise was very enjoyable. I thought some of the descriptions were excellent: "They were the kind of voices we heard rarely in our house. I could hear rich carpets in their voices, books and pearls and fur." "I reluctantly let my bundle drop into the dim hole, thinking of the stones Agnes and Frans and I had thrown into the canal to seek out the monsters. My things thudded onto the dirt floor. I felt like an apple tree losing its fruit." "He guessed and yet he could not say. His blindness took away his confidence so that he did not trust the thoughts in his mind." (  )whymaggiemay | Jun 19, 2009 | 1  I just love this book - and the movie version of it! It is a piece of historical fiction which imagines the story of a famous painting. Such a unique concept which works really well. It is a simple yet rich story and Tracey Chevalier tells it beautifully. It is really interesting to learn the way in which artists used to mix their pigments. Jemima79 | May 11, 2009 | 1 Exquisitely written - a readers visual delight. ( )taconsolo | May 9, 2009 | I really enjoyed this book-- I found the setting and time period very interesting and the characters well developed and sypathetic (even his wife). I followed it up by watching the movie-- the film was true in tone and plot, but somehow made for a slow dull 2 hours. The book didn't seem dull and slow-- there's just too many wonderful descriptions of painting and inner thoughts/feelings that didn't work so well on screen. ( )technodiabla | May 8, 2009 | 0.017 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0452282152, Paperback)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 (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:52 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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