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Summary: One of the best books I have ever read!!!
Review: This book was sooooo good. It is just a book that captures you and you do not want to put down the book. Just to think that this person, Vermeer, was a real person. After i finished reading it i looked up the picture on the internet. It seriously captures you and you can't take your eyes away from the painting. It is just amazing to think that you are looking at a very realistic picture of someone in the 1600's. It just blows my mind away. I strongly suggest reading this book. It is so good and i could read it over and over again. You are sad when it is over.
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Summary: Fantastic
Review: A best seller, takes you to far away places, makes you feel as if you are in another century.
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Summary: A maid comes for free
Review: This last sentence of Tracy Chevalier's novel sums up all the irony associated with being a poor woman in the 17th Century. Until the end of this novel, Griet has absolutely no control over any part of her life. Even at the end, her choice is not much of a choice; it is based on economic necessity. This novel is an amazing portrait of the life of a maid in Delft during this time period.Indeed, Griet's occupation as a maid is dictated for her. Her parents simply tell her she will go to work as a maid; she has no voice in the matter. Once at the Vermeer's household, she has no choice about the job responsibilities she will fulfill, whether she will pose for a painting, and from whom she will take orders. Even her few small possessions are not her own. In addition to this lack of control, Griet is subject to injustices at every turn, such as being accused of theft, fending off advances tactfully from wealthy patrons, and being disliked by every person in the house except her master. Griet's master, Vermeer, is perhaps the most interesting character in this novel. While not outwardly unkind to Griet, he inflicts the most damage upon her self-esteem and sense of self-worth. He is portrayed as not an unkind man, but not a kind one either. He is utterly self-absorbed, and only does things when they benefit him in some way. Despite this, he is pitiable, because he is so clearly miserable with his life. Even when he comes to Griet's aid, it is so that she can remain his assistant. This was a fascinating historical fictional account of a little-known but tremendously gifted artist. Beautifully and sensitively written, at the book's end you will feel you know the Papist's Corner and Vermeer's house therein--as well as it can be known, anyway.
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Summary: Unsurprising in plot & character but satisfying nonetheless.
Review: Griet is a teenage girl living in the 17th century city of Delft Holland. Her father can no longer work as a tile maker because he lost his sight and the family is in need of money. So they find Griet employment as a live-in servant in Vermeer's household. The scenes are short. The characters are not deep and the town is narrowly depicted through Griet's life of laundry, shopping and cleaning. The only luminous part of Griet's day is cleaning Vermeer's painting studio. She must clean, but take care to place every item back precisely where it was. Griet doesn't mind. She has had practice cleaning and replacing items in their exact place for her blind father. But most importantly, she gets an opportunity to look at what Vermeer is painting. As time goes on, she eventually assists Vermeer with the preparation of paint colors and the more time she spends with him, the more she comes to admire and long for Vermeer and the imaginary world he creates on canvas. In the real world, Griet's family struggles. Her younger sister becomes ill, her brother toils as a tile maker's apprentice, and her parents scarcely make do. The butcher's son is courting Griet and a future as his wife is a realistic match and an improvement from her current situation for both her and her family; a butcher's son would ensure that they do not go hungry. Vermeer produces several paintings in this novel including a portrait of Griet wearing a pearl earring. I recommend being able to take a look at the artworks mentioned in the book. I found myself referring to the 2 on the cover and I looked at the Procuress and others when I was reading about them. The entire book is unsurprising in plot and character, but satisfying nonetheless. It felt as if only the necessary details were left in the novel crafting a sparse and finely formed story that I easily enjoyed. I will certainly be reading more of Tracy Chevalier.
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Summary: A pearl
Review: Johannes Vermeer is one of the most appraised and complete painters of all time. His ending in poverty and short life add to that aura of mistery and curiosity that envolves names like Michelangelo, Mozart and such. The name of the book is also the name of one of the most famous paintings by the XVIIth century, wich is considered the "Dutch Monalisa". If you have never seen this painting, just look at the cover of the book. Who is that girl? Like DaVinci's Monalisa, no one knows who was the model to Vermeer's almost mystic portrait. That's what author Tracy Chevalier imagines in her story. "Girl with a pearl earring" is the tale, told in first person, of Griet, the suddenly impoverished girl who spent more than two years as a maid in the Vermeer's household. Griet's arrival is seen with suspicions from the beginning, because she's a protestant, not a catholic like the Vermeers. Four daughters, the wife, the mother-in-law, and an older maid, everybody dislikes the new girl, with the exception of Johannes himseld, a quiet, withdrawn yet intense man; but, with her simple and straightforward way, Griet, little by little, becomes one of the most important people in the house. Read the book and you'll know why. Chevalier's book is, in fact, almost like a Vermeer painting: behind the apparent simplicity lies technic, perception and study. I've seen a few people complain that this book has no plot, no climax, it's dull, etc. Well, my advice is to this people is: stick to your shallow thrillers and gun-fight books. "Girl with a pearl earring" is a book made for people able to appreciate it. Just like a painting, but moving through your mind. Grade 9.0/10
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Summary: In short, though the book isn't,...
Review: satisfying and complex. Ms. Chevalier's research pays great dividends to us readers as we see a perfectly created world of Vermeer's life and home. You don't have to be an afficionado of the world of painting or Vermeer to appreciate the nice prose in this book. Although it drags at times, it is in the end satisfying in the arcs that the characters take through the story.
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Summary: Disappointing Character Study
Review: I really wish publishers would start stating on the book cover whether or not the novel contained within has a plot. This one does not, or at least not much of one. I'm not interested in reading character studies, and if I was, this wouldn't be one I had liked. An untrained, uneducated serving girl has the know how to fix the arrangement of a master artist's paintings so they become great. Uh huh. I don't think so. And even worse, I didn't care about her, the artist, or anyone else in the book. Don't waste your money. Find something with a plot.
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Summary: Linking the Tangible to a Story We'd Like to Believe...
Review: Back in 2000, "Girl With a Pearl Earring" became one of the first major novels I had read since John Irving's "The World According to Garp" more than 25 years ago. As an ex-journalist, I can't explain my aversion to fiction, other than to say that anything akin to "once upon a time" is already six feet under to me. Truth has always seemed stranger than fiction. I was attracted to this book for one reason. I was at the Maurithuis Museum at the Hague in the Netherlands in 1996 and saw Vermeer's "Girl with a Pearl Earring" and "A View of Delft" (both pictured on the book's dust jacket) in person. They are the most unforgettable paintings I have ever seen. Vermeer's paintings are incredibly hypnotic, drawing us into a time and place that no longer exists. By virtue of thousands of brush strokes, we are pulled into a time warp which places us into a scene the same surreal way that an old photograph does. This is what author Tracy Chevalier has wonderfully achieved. Unlike other paintings riddled with religious motifs, nearly all of Vermeer's 35 known works have the ability to force you to think, "Yes, this must have been what ordinary life in Holland was like more than 300 years ago." And one can be quite moved by this even if one loathes cheap sentiment. The book's triumph is taking the tangible, that is, the painting which still resides in the Netherlands -- fusing it with what historians know about life in 17th century Holland -- and then concocting something that not only is believable, but plausible, even though our minds are telling us, "But this is still a piece of fiction." Griet, our heroine, does seems mature beyond her years. Yet her thoughts are not unbelievable when we remember our own youth, what scared us, moved us, what made us care about what others thought. We felt wise beyond our years. Only later did we discover how naive we were, how much more we had yet to learn. Griet's narration reads better if we imagine her telling her story from the point of view of an adult reflecting about her thoughts when she was 16, and not in the present tense, as presented here. Still, there's a soft rhythm emanating from her narration that doesn't seem pretentious in a way that would call attention to the author's writing style, the mortal sin of any book. When something is good, we don't think about how words are strung together. We are so enthralled that time loses all meaning, like a dog whose only notion of it is something nebulous that must last forever. The events which force Griet to work for Vermeer and the tragedy that occurs later, have less emotional impact on Griet as a 17th century girl than if she were a 20th century girl. They are treated without sappiness. We watch Griet's transformation as an attractive young woman who is already aware of her effect on men, to something more complex and cunning. We listen to her efforts to de-feminize herself to deflect unwanted attention, her silly and resigned rationalizations in her trading of dispassionate "minor" sexual favors to achieve her goals, however vague they may seem. We deduce that Griet is a creature of the moment in her actions, but oddly, in her mind, she is also a girl who has one eye on her own future, as well as her family's. The greatest scenes in the book are the conversations, sparse as they are. When Vermeer tackles the complex subject of religious attitudes toward paintings and whether they have any relevance to the viewer, despite the fact that his paintings are not riddled with religious themes -- he does so with such clarity and logic -- that it has you soaring into the stratosphere, like listening to Einstein breaking down the theory of relativity into simple language that anyone can understand without being offended. In addition, Griet's efforts to articulate her emotional feelings about the master Vermeer are wonderfully conveyed. She is explicit in almost every other emotion, but never about her growing romantic feelings toward Vermeer. Yet it is clear in her narration that she loves Vermeer in her own special way. This, to me, is what others have long said to be the essence of romance. It is the notion of "what if?" and all that it entails, while the rest is just "life as it all turned out." The few sexual passages in this book do seem off-kilter to its mostly placid and intelligent tone. They were necessary to illustrate Griet's awareness of her allure, as well as her low self-image, which betray her confident narrative. But it would have been better to allude rather than to describe what seems mildly lurid. My first thought was, "Well, here's the 'PG-13' portion of the book which calls attention to itself." The placid tone Chevalier has painstakingly created is now a little jarring, a mild rant against the sufferings inflicted upon women by bestial men throughout time. The book's ending (without giving it away) is "Zhivago-esque" (the movie and not the Pasternak book, though purists say one should never compare apples to oranges). It is soft, oblique and rich with a wonderful sense of irony and closure. It has a completeness that takes many other authors several hundred more pages to convey. Turning fiction into reality, mixing facts with a creative extrapolation of how the "Girl with a Pearl Earring" came to be, is the magic all of the world's best writers desire. Minor faults aside, Chevalier's account is brilliant enough that in my mind, Vermeer's painting is now inextricably linked to Chevalier's book. The girl now has a name and her name is Griet. The result, quite eerily, is this. After reading "Girl With a Pearl Earring" -- how can anyone look into those luminous eyes of the girl in Vermeer's painting -- in quite the same way again?
Rating:
Summary: almost as entrancing as the painting itself
Review: Girl with a Pearl Earring has climbed right up there on my favroite novels list. In this gem Tracy Chevalier follows Griet, a young maid in Holland in the 1660s. Her writing is smoothe and subtle. When reading it you feel as though you are touching and seeing things through Griet's eyes. What moved me the most was her description of Johannes Vermeer's art and his process of meticulous planning and painting. After reading the novel I looked up some of his paintings online and I could not draw my eyes away from them. I highly reccomend this novel for a long afternoon where one can allow themselves to be taken by the words and truely fall into the story as it unfolds.
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Summary: Want to love a sophisticated book, no effort required?
Review: I didn't realize how much I had enjoyed reading *Girl with a Pearl Earring* until I had finished the last page, closed the book, and saw that there wasn't any more of it to read. It seduced my attention in such small steps that I hadn't noticed what Tracy Chevalier had accomplished: this is not just an interesting story about a painting, it is a stunning portrait in itself. To borrow a phrase from a high school teacher of mine, Tracy Chevalier could write about opening a box of cereal, and it would still be the most interesting thing you have read in a month. I read in a review on this website that *Pearl Earring* was a "surprisingly good read" despite its lack of plot and abundance of "uninteresting" and "unpleasant" characters. This description also suggests what the reviewer thinks would comprise an UNsurprisingly good book - lots of plot and pleasant characters? What fun would that be? The reason this reviewer thought the book was good _anyway_ is because Chevalier managed to break through his or her preconception that "good" means "a lot of cool stuff is going on." In Griet, Griet's family, and Griet's employers, Chevalier has created a wonderfully detailed and intelligent possible world where works of art may be created. After reading this book (in two days flat, by the way - I did not want to stop reading), I wanted to thank Chevalier for changing the way I could admire a painting. Vermeer was in the book, yes. All the little facts were correct, and historic Delft was presented plague, market, art patrons and all. But in the end, I only really cared about the girl - the girl who could read the people around her with only a glance, who knew that respectable women did not appear open-mouthed in portraits, who could see without being told what is missing in a small, dark spot of canvas, and who could find comfort in a small square of Delft tile made by her poor father when forced to live apart from him. If you are interested in this sort of an exercise in historical fiction, I highly recommend this book. And if you're wondering how a slow, quiet story without a plot can be enjoyable, read it and let Chevalier surprise you.
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