Life Studies: Stories [Mass Market Paperback]

Susan Vreeland (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 29, 2005

With her richly textured novels Susan Vreeland has offered pioneering portraits of the artist’s life. Now, in a collection of profound wisdom and beauty, she explores the transcendent power of art through the eyes of ordinary people. Life Studies begins with historic tales that, rather than focusing directly on the great Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masters themselves, render those on the periphery—their lovers, servants, and children—as their personal experiences play out against those of Manet, Monet, van Gogh, and others. Vreeland then gives us contemporary stories in which her characters—a teacher, a construction worker, and an orphan for example—encounter art in meaningful, often surprising ways. A fascinating exploration of the lasting strength of art in everyday life, Life Studies is a dazzling addition to Vreeland’s outstanding body of work.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Having carved out a niche as an insightful and sensitive chronicler of artists' lives, Vreeland (Girl in Hyacinth Blue) continues to consider the artistic impulse with fresh and imaginative fictional portraits. The first eight stories in this collection are based on biographical incidents in the lives of such artists as Renoir, Van Gogh and Cézanne, though the painters themselves are not the protagonists but figures to the side, as it were, in the lives of other people. A wet nurse who cares for Berthe Morisot's baby daughter gradually becomes aware of the liaison between Morisot and her brother-in-law, Édouard Manet. At Giverny, Monet's gardener watches in anguish as the artist burns his water lily paintings. Vreeland herself has a painterly eye that conveys vivid sensory impressions of rural landscapes, city street scenes and domestic interiors. The remaining 10 stories revolve around ordinary people who are profoundly influenced by exposure to artistic creation. Notable is the semiautobiographical "Crayon, 1955," in which a young girl of humble background is introduced to pre-Columbian figures and Picasso's paintings, which enable her to accept the death of the grandfather who encouraged her to see the beauty in differences. While some stories stretch the theme too far, the best of them have a luminous clarity that does justice to the author's intentions.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Vreeland, whose Girl in Hyacinth Blue (1999) fictionalized the story behind a Vermeer painting, again blends fact and fiction to bring artists and the lives of those affected by them to life. She approaches her subjects, from Renoir to a young girl coming to terms with death, with emotional sensitivity and great humanity, revealing how they, too, survive daily life. With a wonderful eye for detail and thorough research, she recreates the Impressionist and post-Impressionist worlds. A few minor quibbles: the first set of stories threatens to veer into romance novel melodrama, and the high moral value placed on art creates perhaps unrealistically optimistic messages. Vreeland hopes to show the redeeming power of art in this beautiful collection, and she does.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Mass Market Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (November 29, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0143036106
• ISBN-13: 978-0143036104
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 4.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #428,053 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Susan Vreeland's short fiction has appeared in journals such as The Missouri Review, Confrontation, New England Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. Her first novel, What Love Sees, was made into a CBS Sunday Night Movie. She teaches English literature and Art in San Diego public schools.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars vivid, April 4, 2005

By 

Genevive (Redlands, Ca) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Life Studies: Stories (Hardcover)

Susan Vreeland is fast becoming one of my favorite living authors. Her ability to draw you quickly and seamlessly into a living moment is one of the best I have come across, and I was impressed and relieved to find that the details I found the most poignant in her historical fiction sketches were the ones she gave bibliographic references for at the end of the book. In addition, I found her web sight containing the art pieces referenced in her stories at the beginning of my reading, and it greatly enhanced my overall experience:

http://www.svreeland.com/ls-paintings.html

In general, I found this book absorbing and vivid, but educated and relatively free from sentimentality. She is able to change voices well from character to character, but not so abruptly and obviously that the book loses fluidity. These chapters, each dedicated to a human life affected by a particular work of art, were saturated with reality and living detail. Really beautifully done; I was sorry to see it end.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars (3.5) Art imitates life, February 16, 2005

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Life Studies: Stories (Hardcover)

Much like Tracy Chevalier, Vreeland dips her pen into the palette of great art in search of human drama. An apt choice, for this is a novel filled with life, an emotional canvas as rich and varied as humanity itself. Instead of the obvious, the artists themselves, Vreeland writes about their contemporaries, the people around the genius of creativity, fleshing out the lives of her chosen artists, the Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, their lovers, children, neighbors and servants. These observers enjoy the most intimate knowledge of the daily struggles, the passion to create vs. the need to provide for families and how their behavior affects those around them.

Beginning in France in 1876, we are introduced to Renoir, Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cezanne and Modigliani. In "Winter of Abandon", Claude Monet's wife dies, his children and those of his mistress stranded in the harsh winter, understanding that the lady must reclaim her family name at the thaw of spring. Meanwhile they cling to a world isolated from reality. The days are difficult for the wet nurse of the baby of Berthe and Eugene Manet ("Cradle Song") and her own child dies while she lives with the couple. Completely unaware of the heartbreak of the servant's life, the couple fixates on their own obsessions, including Berthe's attraction to her brother-in-law, Edouard Manet. And in "Olympia's Look", Suzanne Manet, widow of Edouard, enjoys the revenge of a lifetime.

Vincent Van Gogh ("The Yellow Jacket") warns his subject, "You can ruin yourself in the night cafes", where the absinthe flows freely and muddles the senses. Walking the streets of Arles, Van Gogh stares raptly at the wonder of nature's colors. Curiously (for me), the stories I enjoyed the least were those about Van Gogh and Paul Cezanne; these have less of the emotional richness of the first stories. Yet, in the very next one, "A Flower for Ginette", the magic is back, the author's descriptions evoking images of the great paintings, made more real by the histories that surround them.

In contrast to the historical stories at the beginning, separated by an enchanting travel tale, the second half of the book consists of more contemporary tales, people who inhabit the real world and their relationships to art. These tales provide the small intimacies that transcend the years, linking genius to humanity. This author is at her most confidant when speaking in the language of the artist, shaping images into words, painting stories for her readers. "All art is a matter of reception." Luan Gaines/ 2005.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Moments of intimate beauty, April 5, 2006

By 

Stephanie Cowell (New York, New York United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Life Studies: Stories (Mass Market Paperback)

Susan Vreeland's first book, the exquisite "Girl in Hyacinth Blue," was told in a series of stories centering around one Vermeer painting. In this book she returns to the story form, this time concerning many artists instead of just one. It contains moments of real beauty and for those who love art, or grew up with artists as I did, quite real and memorable.

These are unusual stories in form and perception. Art and the artist are seen from an angle, often told from the perspective of a model or a child or a lover. It is as if you rounded a corner and bumped into Renoir's easel or noticed Cézanne across a country road talking to a friend. These artists touch you as they really lived, as rather ordinary people. The stories are sometimes as quiet as walk in the woods. But in the end you feel you have known the little boy who threw stones at Cézanne, or the tired banker who goes to a weekend gathering in Montmartre and finds, in a short conversation with the artist Renoir who lives upstairs, a new joy in his life.

Of the contemporary stories in the second half of the book, "Crayon," about a little girl and her dying artist grandfather is such a beautiful piece of writing.

This book is for any reader who would like to know what it was like to see one of these artists not as some sort of sexual athlete or superman but walking across the street quietly with his paint box in his hand.