Girl with a Pearl Earring
by Tracy Chevalier
List Price:
Our Price: $0.69
You Save: $14.31 (95%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions
Book Summary Information
Author: Tracy ChevalierEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-01-08
ISBN: 0452282152
Number of pages: 240
Publisher: Plume
Book Reviews of Girl with a Pearl Earring
Book Review: Girl With a Pearl Idea, Poor Execution
Summary: 3 Stars
Girl With a Pearl Idea, Poor ExecutionGirl With a Pearl Earring, by Tracy Chevalier, provides an interesting, though far from "seamless" (as it is billed) mesh of history and fiction. The novel traces the story of Griet, daughter of a blinded tilesman, who is forced to work, as a result of the blinding, as a maid in the unlikely house of Johannes Vermeer. Griet, who is assumed at the outset to be the girl in the painting, eventually turns every woman in the household against her as she becomes closer to Vermeer. After being painted, at the bidding of rich Van Ruijven, she is summarily kicked out of the house and marries butcher "Pieter the son," who had been courting her.
The story, though obviously fictional, is meant to create a life for the woman in the anonymous portrait, believed by some to be Vermeer's daughter, though his oldest daughter would have been only eleven at the time of the painting in 1666; clearly too young to be the girl in the picture. So, we must first assume that this woman is not a direct relation of Vermeer, and second, we must assume that she exists, and is not a creation of Vermeer's mind. With these contentions accepted, and with the concession that Chevalier need not write a fully believable theory in order for her novel to be enjoyable, the conclusion should still be drawn that the work is a failure. Whether she wishes to provide glimpse into the man known as Vermeer, or a work of looking at and being absorbed in imagination about art, or an obscure and flimsy seventeenth-century Dutch Romance, Chevalier can claim no victory.
Vermeer, who has eluded historians with his relatively late rise to fame (centuries later) and the little known about him and relatively few paintings (thirty-five) believed existent, could not be the ambivalent hermit which Chevalier paints. The character of Vermeer, far and away the easiest and most important character to make interesting, is a static, indifferent painter who paints the girl to please the lust of Van Ruijven and appease Griet, a maid, who refuses to sit and be in the concurrent The Concert with the same man. We are made to believe Vermeer has fallen, at least in part, for this maid, and thus cannot paint her sitting with the sleazy aristocrat. We are made also to believe Vermeer paints this portrait in secret from his jealous wife who has had it in for Griet since her arrival to clean Vermeer's studio, and that it so enrages his wife when she finds out the maid has worn her earring in the painting, that she births a sickly child a month early on the floor, in the middle of Vermeer's studio.
So, there's an elegant, rich, child-bearing wife and a maid of misfortune, hired to clean Vermeer's studio. Griet cleans the studio with precision and perfection, measuring placements of items with arms lengths and returning them to the original position. And, though it takes time for Vermeer to clarify his liking of Griet, from the beginning Griet is infatuated with Vermeer. Chevalier almost seeks to write of a Jay Gatz instead of a Johannes Vermeer; with Griet on a Gatsby-like quest to discover who the man with the palette really is.
But the Vermeer of the novel is so much less than the Vermeer of common myth and so much less worthy of a quest to discover. The novelized Vermeer refuses to defend Griet when she does his bidding and is caught; refuses to side with his wife against Griet; refuses to disobey rich patrons; and, yet, also refuses to allow Griet to be painted with the town sleaze. The negative inference is that this Vermeer cared about nothing but a perfect, finalized painting; a nice mythical view of a real man but hardly a real view of a myth. We are even treated to such pearls of (or, rather, perils to) wisdom as: "You [Catherina] and the children are not part of this world...you are not meant to be" in response to why he has never painted his wife. A weak character is Chevalier's Vermeer; a man who bares no soul and appears, really, to have none to bear. We are left, in the end, to wonder if he actually cares about anything beside his work and, if the answer is no, then we are left to wonder if the character, as written, could be so philosophical to think of separate spheres of art and life.
Chevalier's painfully strained and stretched metaphors make the novel no less easier to digest: Chevalier goes to such lengths to point them out that they are no fun and require no thought. Chevalier explains where each tip of an eight pointed star leads, and allows Griet to wonder if she's chosen the right path. A broken tile of Griet and her brother Franz, what could prove a savory metaphor in retrospect, is destroyed by Chevalier's didactic need to help the unintelligent reader by saying that the girl who broke it could never have known how true a prophecy it would become once the two siblings lose contact. Finally, a knife sent spinning to floor at the hands of Catharina in Griet's house at the beginning of the novel is referenced multiple times to keep its memory fresh before a final showdown between Catherina and Griet concludes in the same result: with the spinning knife ending with its point toward Griet. Clearly by the flat characterization, Chevalier assumes the reader will be more attracted to Griet's molestations at the hands of Van Ruijven and her time in alleys with Pieter the son than with actual style
The Verdict: For a breezy pseudo-intellectual read, Girl With a Pearl Earring is sufficient. For a real look at Vermeer, read Anthony Bailey's Vermeer: View of Delft. For a worthwhile combination of history and fiction, look elsewhere.
Summary of Girl with a Pearl Earring
An Independent Bestseller
Winner of the 2000 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award!
Tracy Chevalier transports readers to a bygone time and place in this richly-imagined portrait of the young woman who inspired one of Vermeer's most celebrated paintings.
History and fiction merge seamlessly in this luminous novel about artistic vision and sensual awakening. Girl with a Pearl Earring tells the story of sixteen-year-old Griet, whose life is transformed by her brief encounter with genius . . . even as she herself is immortalized in canvas and oil.
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
Historical Books
Book Subjects
- Arts & Photography
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Business & Investing
- Children's Books
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Computers & Internet
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- Entertainment
- Gay & Lesbian
- Health, Mind & Body
- History
- Home & Garden
- Horror
- Law
- Literature & Fiction
- Mystery & Thrillers
- Nonfiction
- Outdoors & Nature
- Parenting & Families
- Professional & Technical
- Reference
- Religion & Spirituality
- Romance
- Science
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Sports
- Teens
- Travel
Most talked about in Historical Books
Pirate Latitudes: A Novelby Michael Crichton
Harper; Published: 2009-11-24; Roughcut; Book
Best price: $2.28
Price in other shops:
The Master Butchers Singing Club: A Novelby Louise Erdrich
Harper Perennial; Published: 2004-02; Paperback; Book
Best price: $2.83
Price in other shops:
The Last Witchfinder: A Novelby James Morrow
William Morrow; Published: 2006-03-14; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $4.00
Price in other shops:
Zorroby Isabel Allende
HarperAudio; Published: 2005-05-03; Audio CD; Book
Best price: $3.03
Price in other shops:
The Hot Kid: A Novelby Elmore Leonard
William Morrow; Published: 2005-05-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $2.89
Price in other shops:
The Last Kingdom (The Saxon Chronicles Series #1)Mass Market Paperback; Book
Bones of the Hills (Conqueror, Book 3)by Conn Iggulden
Harper Collins Canada; Published: 2008; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $44.70
Marchby Geraldine Brooks
Penguin Books; Published: 2006; Paperback; Book
Gates of Rome (Emperor 1)by Conn Iggulden
Harpercollins Pb; Published: 2003-09-01; Mass Market Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.80
Girl With a Pearl Earringby Tracy Chevalier
Harper Collins Audio; Published: 2002-06-17; Audio Cassette; Book
Best price: $86.82
Similar Books and other products
The Dew Breakerby Edwidge Danticat
Vintage; Published: 2005-03-08; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.67
Price in other shops:
No Country for Old Men (Vintage International)by Cormac McCarthy
Vintage; Published: 2007-10-09; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.45
Price in other shops:
The Reader (Oprah's Book Club)by Bernhard Schlink
Vintage; Published: 1999-03-07; Paperback; Book
Best price: $1.90
Price in other shops:
Animal Dreams (Paperback)by Barbara Kingsolver (Author)
Published: 1991; Unknown Binding; Book
Best price: $8.67
Selected Storiesby Alice Munro
Vintage; Published: 1997-11-11; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.59
Price in other shops:
The Lady and the Unicorn: A Novelby Tracy Chevalier
Plume; Published: 2004-12-28; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.40
Price in other shops:
Wonderlandby Tommy Kovac
Disney Press; Published: 2009-03-17; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $12.23
Price in other shops:
Perceiving the Arts: An Introduction to the Humanities (10th Edition)by Dennis J. Sporre
Prentice Hall; Published: 2011-03-03; Paperback; Book
Best price: $51.20
Price in other shops:
Remarkable Creaturesby Tracy Chevalier
Dutton Adult; Published: 2010-01-05; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $7.44
Price in other shops:
Girl With a Pearl EarringLION'S GATE ENTERTAINMENT; Release date: 2004-05-04; Published: 2004-05-01; DVD
Best price: $5.00
Price in other shops: