Girl with a Pearl Earring

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Summary: "Girl With A Pearl Earring" By Tracy Chevalier
Review: "Girl with a Pearl Earring" by Tracy Chevalier is an interesting and intriguing book. It begins in 1664 in Delft when a young girl from a low class family named Griet meets the painter Vermeer and his wife Caterina for a job interview. This book is very hard to put down once started. It is suspenseful in a non action way so that the reader is hopeful to find out what happens next. It also shows the reader the conflicts between rich and poor, and Catholic and Protestant. Griet leaves her Protestant family at the age of sixteen to work as a maid for the Catholic family of Vermeer. Griet needs to help her family make more money as her brother does. Griet¹s father is unable to work because of an accident with the kiln that made him blind. From the moment that Vermeer met Griet there was a connection that upsets everyone in the household especially his wife Caterina. Because of this Griet has many obstacles in which the family makes her work very difficult, but that does not stop the unspoken love that Griet and Vermeer have for each other that is never revealed. This book was very controversial in showing the conflicts between rich and poor, and catholic and protestant. family that is not wealthy, Griet has to maintain who she is and where she comes from while liking in a completely different life. There are times when Griet is unable to understand things about the family and assumes it is because they are catholic. She is not used to the detailed ways the Vermeer family portrays the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, and is upset when there is a picture of it at the foot of her bed. There is also conflict between rich and poor. Griet is not used to living with people of such high class. There are times when Griet is with the children of the Vermeer family and she sees her sister in the market. Griet is embarrassed and ashamed of how shabby looking her sister is and ignores her regrettably. She is afraid that the children will be mean, as most of the usually are. Griet has many problems with Cornelia, the second oldest child. Cornelia makes the book more suspenseful and interesting with her sly ways of framing Griet and some how getting in her trouble because no one trusts a poor maid. The most conflict begins when Vermeer paints Griet, not as a maid and not as a wealthy woman either. The entire Vermeer household goes ballistic when Griet wears Caterina¹s pearl earring. No one can stand that someone with no importance is able to wear Caterina¹s earring. Through all the conflicts and hard times that Griet goes through, Griet still stands strong and does what she believes, even though at times she may give in along the way. Griet and Vermeer have this love that is never really fulfilled. Many readers may criticize the book because Griet and Vermeer are never together, although they love each other. Their love is never spoken of or acted upon, but is defiantly there. Many may not like that they restrain their feelings and don¹t express their love. Vermeer is attracted to Griet from the moment they meet, when he notices her love for art. Griet is very attracted to him as well, and loves his art spending many nights admiring it alone. The love part of the story should not be criticized, but praised. Griet and Vermeer restrain their feelings and have the discipline to not act upon their feelings. the reader may not realize the strength they both have to keep their love unspoken because of the consequences which would ruin them both as done before to others in the book. This book is well written with a good love story added to a interesting books. It is highly recommended and enjoyed.

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Summary: An insightful look into the head of Young Griet
Review: Girl With A Pearl Earring
The book Girl With a Pearl Earring, by Tracy Chevalier, is an insightful look into the life of the protagonist Griet. Griet is a young woman living in Holland with her caring but manipulative mother, blinded father, and young enthusiastic sister when out of the blue her mother informs her that she is to leave to work for the painter Vermeer and his household in order to make ends meat for her family. Reluctantly she packs her few possessions and head off to the other side of town where her life will be completely different even down to the smallest changes(like the butcher she is to go to). First of all her new house is in the Catholic section of town and growing up a Protestant makes her feel very out of place. Secondly she knows know one there and is treated by almost all like she is no one. As she works masterfully cleaning Master Vermeer's studio and running errands for the old Widow and mother in law, Maria Thins she finds how difficult her place in life is. Half the days Vermeer is kindly and affectionate towards her while other days he is distant and cold. Griet, among all her troubles finds herself falling for the charming butchers son. Although she and her master clearly have feelings for each other they are kept apart by their class differences. this makes things even more complicated for the young Griet. She must worry about was is best for her family and herself, although she does not have much of a say as a young woman in seventeenth century Holland. Tracy Chevalier manages to really get inside Griet's head while keeping the reader thoroughly enthralled.
This book was by far one of the best I've read and I highly recommend it. One reason why this book is so wonderful is because you get to knw Griet so well that you feel as though you we're right there with her. You can truly understand and relate to many of the feelings she confronts. Although Girl With a Pearl Earring takes place in the 17th century her problems are not unlike the ones many young women face. It is often hard to tell where one fits in especially in a group that you are foreign too. Being able to feel for the protagonist made a big difference in how read the book and it kept me turning pages late into the night. Another reason I found this book interesting was because the characters were so deep. At the beginning you are introduced to the major characters but as the story progresses more is revealed about their personalities and you are able to sympathize with even Griet's antagonists. For example Tanneke, the other household made, is often cross and bitter towards Griet. However you learn that although she may not be so sympathetic to Griet she is a good person at heart and is not set out just to make Griet unhappy(as one may assume at first). This book was fascinating for me because of deepness behind Griet and her acquaintances.
Although I greatly ejnoyed reading Girl With a Pearl Earring I understand that others may not because they don't knwo what it's like to be a fourteen year old girl. Although the protagonist is a girl and many of the issues she deals with are due to her gender (especially at that particular period of history) it is not a legitimate reason not to read the boom just because you aren't or never were a young woman. There is much more behind the story that boys can appreciate too, and although they may not be able to sympathize with Griet's issues it does not mean that they can't get an idea of what it feels like to be her, and enjoy it while they're at it. This is great book for anybody to read and be able to get an amazing sense of 17th century Holland.

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Summary: My book of the year.
Review: Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier is an historical fiction set in Holland in 1664.
It tells the story of the painting by the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. The painting is a real one, and you can see it on the front cover of the book.
Griet, the heroine of the book comes to the Vermeer house as a servant, and the book is written with Griet as the narrator. We follow Griet through her hard work for the Vermeer family, her first meeting with the father of the family and how he wants to paint her. Griet falls deeply in love with her master, and the book tells a beautiful though heartbreaking story of love and sacrifice. Griet is not only falling in love with her master, but also in his life of colors and paintings. Griet masters the art of mixing colors, and through her work together with Vermeer their relationship becomes very intimat.
The clue of this story is the way it is told through Griet, and the way she manage to bring us with her to her 17th century world in Delft. I loved the book when I read it the first time, have reread it, and know I will read it again. It's a jewel of a novel, or on other words - a master painting. And it has made me interested in other books with the same theme, Dutch art and Dutch history.

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Summary: INVENTING A LIFE
Review: As an author with my debut novel in its initial release, I was quite impressed by Tracy Chevalier's novel GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING. Using the famous Vermeer painting as a launch pad, Ms. Chevalier invents a life for the historically unknown subject of this portrait. Along the way, she provides convincing character portraits for Griet, Vermeer, and numerous other people encircling their lives. Ms. Chevalier also captures the essence of their time and creates a realistic setting for her novel. Great book. Read it soon.

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Summary: The Girl With The Pearl Earring
Review: I quickly got hooked on the story of The Girl With The Pearl Earring; however,it didn't take long to find the voice of the reader annoying -- particularly when Jenna Lamia was trying to mimic the voices of characters other than the heroine. Also, perhaps due to the abridged version, I found one incident in the novel to be unbelievable (when the young maid runs to the arms of Peter after her long, brown tresses were seen by Vermeer). Could it be that was the intention of the author -- to create such an incredulous scene after so much ho-hum, hum-drum?

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Summary: A romantic historical novel of grace and power
Review: In this radiant novel we are introduced to the minutia of family life in 17th century Holland as seen through the eyes of the maid Griet, a sixteen-year-old girl who became the subject of a famous painting by Johannes Vermeer. This is in fact the story of how she became his subject. As such it is a fiction fused into history, an imagination of Vermeer and the life of one of his models. It is a tale that makes us see with alacrity the poverty of choices that a girl without means had in that world, a world caught between feudalism and the rise of the mercantile class. Indeed, Griet had only her cleverness to stay her as she maneuvered among the men and women of privilege who would control her life.

Novelist Tracy Chevalier has a gift for expression and a great talent for telling a tale and weaving into the fabric of her story the poignant details of everyday life. Somehow she makes those details and the acting out of the petty politics of domestic life utterly enthralling. Her first-person narrative of an illiterate girl charms and disquiets by turns. Although this may seem a far-fetched comparison, I was reminded of Mark Twain's Huck Finn, also illiterate, who nonetheless waxed poetic with not just a novelist's but a painter's eye for detail. The words they use are everyday words, but spun out so beautifully, so aptly that they become something close to poetry, all the while maintaining plausibility. In truth no maid nor elegant lady of learning could express herself so well as this girl, but that is the novelist's license, and Chevalier uses it well.

Griet has these choices: a butcher's son with blood under his fingernails; Vermeer, who has a wife and five children (and a sixth on the way); and van Ruijven, Vermeer's rich and lecherous patron, who also has a family. She cannot move to another city, although sometimes she vaguely expresses this childish dream. She, like the vast majority of humankind before the Industrial Revolution, was fated to live and die in the town of her birth. Her life was controlled by the choices she had in men; and what would become of her depended on how she handled those choices. She could not take a job and live alone. She could not abandon her poverty-stricken parents. She could only steer between the rocks and the shoreline, torn between her heart's desire and her good Dutch rationality. Thus, on one level, this is a disturbing tale of how people, especially women, were subject to the dictates of property and privilege, without real choice, working six days a week, from sunup to sundown, for subsistence wages in economic subservience to the privileged few. On another level this a Horatio Alger story of how one might, through hard work, right morality, a bit of clever common sense and--in this case--a pretty face, rise above one's predicament in life. Or, perhaps how one might try. This is also a tale of how our emotions lead us to ends both desirous and disastrous. Griet loves her master, as all good maids should, almost inevitably. Hers is a restrained and protracted love, beyond her control, so that she is caught. In this sense Chevalier's book is a romantic novel, a woman's interest tale of how the heart's desire may or may not be fulfilled. The beloved is a station above Griet; he is an accomplished artist, and he is taken--consumed in a sense--with his work and his large family, and yet she, as her brother points out, "wants him."

One of the nice things about this book is the reproduction of the celebrated Vermeer painting, "Girl with a Pearl Earring" on the cover. As one reads, one can easily refer to the painting again and again; and this is valuable because part of Chevalier's story is an imagination of how the work was painted through an intense study of the painting itself. Those in the visual arts I imagine will find this part of the novel fascinating, and may speculate on how closely Chevalier came to a truth about the process of artistic creation. Chevalier's interpretation includes the idea that the painting was the artist's way of making love to the girl. There can be no doubt of that.

I wish I could write with such grace and with such a feel for the felicitous detail and the absolutely apt phrase that is the hallmark of Chevalier's prose. I also wish I had the cunning to construct a novel so carefully. I knew I was in the thrall of a master as early as page nine when Griet learns that she is to clean Vermeer's studio without disturbing anything so that every object is returned to exactly where it had been. Chevalier has Griet remark: "After my father's accident we had learned to place things where he always knew to find them. It was one thing to do this for a blind man, though. Quite another for a man with a painter's eyes." Or, on page 163, Griet is home visiting her mother, and a "neighbor, a bright-eyed old woman who loved market talk," was there amid the rumors that Griet would appear in a painting alongside the lecherous van Ruijven. Griet tells her mother, "my master is beginning the painting that you were asking about. Van Ruijven has come over...Everyone who is to be in the painting is there now." Griet then observes that the gossipy neighbor "gazed at me as if I had just set a roast capon in front of her." Griet adds, "That will take care of the rumors."

Such skilled and subtle writing moves the reader along with a sense of deep involvement, and opens wide the eyes of other writers, who might learn from the very accomplished and gifted Tracy Chevalier.

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Summary: A warm, believable, and enchanting piece of fiction...
Review: Girl With a Pearl Earring is the story of Griet, young housemaid in the Vermeer home. Vermeer is a very well-respected painter and his work is highly valuable today, since he only painted 35 known pieces. In this work of fiction, Griet is, basically, Vermeer's young muse. After she moves into the house to assist Vermeer's wife, she slowly is befriended by the painter and becomes his assistant.

This book is full of rich characters...from the seemingly aloof Vermeer himself, to the bratty and spiteful daughter Cornelia. One of the highlights of the book is Maria Thins, the grandmother of the house, and one of the few friends Griet can trust. Maria is a quiet conspirator to help Griet in all the problems she has throughout the story.

There isn't one point in this book where it becomes unbelievable. The whole story is spectulation as to who the young girl in the painting Girl With the Pearl Earring actually is. This book will pull you into Griet's world and convince you that her life and story took place exactly as written by Chevalier. Overall, this is a rich, warm, and atmospheric work that is deserving of its best-seller status.

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Summary: How a poor little Dutch girl got to wear earrings.
Review: This book is interesting from an historical point of view -- for anyone who loves history, art or Hans Brinker stories, but it doesn't quite sustain the reader's interest. The story tends to drag a bit.

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Summary: Art lesson
Review: Another book that features art by Vermeer. The story is well written, but the main characters never really grabbed my attention. I could never feel the pull of the art or artist, as in the Girl in Hyacinth Blue.

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Summary: Excellent
Review: This book was a delight to read. The criticism that it is offensive because Griet offers several insightful comments to Vermeer is laughable. While reading, I thought I could tell that Mrs. Chevalier graduated from a Creative Writing program, but that is neither here nor there. The writing was crisp, direct and engaging, as were both her characters and the world they inhabitied. I would have been very proud to write this book. I especially enjoyed the last fify or so pages.