Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780525945277
ISBN number: 052594527X
Label: Dutton Adult
Manufacturer: Dutton Adult
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 240
Printing Date: January 01, 2000
Publishing house: Dutton Adult
Release Date: December 27, 1999
Sale Popularity Level: 74483
Studio: Dutton Adult
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
A beguiling story about artistic vision and sensual depth that eerily and eloquently re-creates the feeling of the famous painting that inspired it
In seventeenth-century Delft, there's a strict social order-rich and poor, Catholic and Protestant, master and servant-and all know their place. When Griet becomes a maid in the household of the painter Johannes Vermeer, she thinks she knows her role: housework, laundry, and the care of his six children. She even feels able to handle his shrewd mother-in-law; his restless, sensual wife; and their jealous servant. What no one expects is that Griet's quiet manner, quick perceptions, and fascination with her master's paintings will draw her inexorably into his world. Their growing intimacy sparks whispers; and when Vermeer paints her wearing his wife's pearl earrings, the gossip escalates into a full-blown scandal that irrevocably changes Griet's life.
Written with the precision and focus of an Old Master painting, Girl With a Pearl Earring is a vivid portrait of colorful seventeenth-century Delft, as well as the hauntingly poignant story of one young girl's rite of passage.
'Beautifully written, mysterious, and almost unbearably poignant . . . I read it with a book of Vermeer's paintings beside me and it was a magical experience to glance from one to the other.'-Deborah Moggach, author of Tulip Fever
Amazon.com Review:
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 blue 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
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers -
I really enjoyed this book. When I started it I wasn't exactly sure what to expect, but I was immediately swept into the story and the relationship between Griet and Vermeer.
I think I'll rent out the movie now :)
Rated by buyers 
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I started to read it and could not put it down.
Some authors will spend pages describing a scene or a person, making a book drag out. This author, with a few words, made you feel like you where standing subsequent to the character.
Rated by buyers -
I loved it. The way the writer portrayed each character was so vivid that you can almost see what they look like and the way they talk. It is a great book.
Rated by buyers -
A friend recommended this book to me and I completely loved it. The movie adaptation was completely beautiful, adding a visual aspect to the story, but the book, as usual, managed to carry more depth to the story; a sense of how very hard the girl had to work, the kinds of pressure she was under and how very dangerous it was for her to pose for the painting.
Unforgettable.
Rated by buyers -
we read this in English class. So good... easy words, but created a great sense of romance and mystery
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