Girl with a Pearl Earring (movie tie-in edition): A Novel (Paperback)

~ (Author) "My mother did not tell me they were coming..." (more)
Key Phrases: concert painting, yellow mantle, birth feast, Maria Thins, Meat Hall, Oude Langendijck (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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 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 --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

The scant confirmed facts about the life of Vermeer, and the relative paucity of his masterworks, continues to be provoke to the literary imagination, as witnessed by this third fine fictional work on the Dutch artist in the space of 13 months. Not as erotic or as deviously suspenseful as Katharine Weber's The Music Lesson, or as original in conception as Susan Vreeland's interlinked short stories, Girl in Hyacinth Blue, Chevalier's first novel succeeds on its own merits. Through the eyes of its protagonist, the modest daughter of a tile maker who in 1664 is forced to work as a maid in the Vermeer household because her father has gone blind, Chevalier presents a marvelously textured picture of 17th-century Delft. The physical appearance of the city is clearly delineated, as is its rigidly defined class system, the grinding poverty of the working people and the prejudice against Catholics among the Protestant majority. From the very first, 16-year-old narrator Griet establishes herself as a keen observer who sees the world in sensuous images, expressed in precise and luminous prose. Through her vision, the personalities of coolly distant Vermeer, his emotionally volatile wife, Catharina, his sharp-eyed and benevolently powerful mother-in-law, Maria Thins, and his increasing brood of children are traced with subtle shading, and the strains and jealousies within the household potently conveyed. With equal skill, Chevalier describes the components of a painting: how colors are mixed from apothecary materials, how the composition of a work is achieved with painstaking care. She also excels in conveying the inflexible class system, making it clear that to members of the wealthy elite, every member of the servant class is expendable. Griet is almost ruined when Vermeer, impressed by her instinctive grasp of color and composition, secretly makes her his assistant, and later demands that she pose for him wearing Catharina's pearl earrings. While Chevalier develops the tension of this situation with skill, several other devices threaten to rob the narrative of its credibility. Griet's ability to suggest to Vermeer how to improve a painting demands one stretch of the reader's imagination. And Vermeer's acknowledgment of his debt to her, revealed in the denouement, is a blatant nod to sentimentality. Still, this is a completely absorbing story with enough historical authenticity and artistic intuition to mark Chevalier as a talented newcomer to the literary scene. Agent, Deborah Schneider.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Plume (September 30, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0452284937
• ISBN-13: 978-0452284937
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (791 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #351,510 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

187 of 194 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simplicity, precision, and light from within . . ., March 30, 2000

By	Miranda F. (Hartland, WI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Girl With a Pearl Earring (Paperback)

In a thrilling emulation of Jan Vermeer's artistic style, Tracy Chevalier uses scenes drawn from everyday life and painstaking attention to detail to tell the story of Griet, a 16-year-old girl who is required by her family's misfortunes to become a maid in the Vermeer household.

I devoured the book the first time through, then read it again to savor the starkly beautiful language and the highly sensual account of 17th century life in a busy Dutch household. On both forays, I drank in the vivid descriptions of Vermeer's paintings and his creative process, from the positioning of his models to the grinding of bone and lead, massicot, madder and ochre, to make his pigments.

To those who complained that nothing happened or that the book was predictable, let me say, this was never meant to be a suspense story in the conventional sense. That an event could be foreseen doesn't render it improperly drawn. The magnetism of this tale is not its ability to surprise us with plot twists but to show the complex and fascinating interplay among people of different stations and sensibilities. Chevalier demonstrates her considerable skill in presenting Griet to be at the same time naive and intelligent, hemmed in by her lack of status and strong of spirit. Her resigned frustration over the many slights and unfair situations she must deal with strikes me as the only sensible option for one who must continue in employment for the sake of those she supports. Though I can't imagine Griet describing herself as anything but ordinary, her attention to detail--as keen in its own way as Vermeer's--and her understanding of the personalities and motives of those around her show her to be a remarkable young woman. The other main characters--sometimes as bound by their elevation as Griet is by her lack of it--behave with annoying reality. Maria Thins, Vermeer's mother-in-law and behind-the-scenes overseer of the household and finances, almost always knows the score. She comes to Griet's aid or not, based on what will best serve her daughter's interests and yet she comes across, not as scheming, but as practical.

Comparable to Vermeer's intricate landscapes are Chevalier's long views of the Delft streets. She has a knack for picking the right detail to convey a mood, a cultural insight, a social contrast.

Vermeer had the extraordinary capability to endow his figures and landscapes with a luminescence that gave his paintings lasting impact. Chevalier imbues this simple story with a similar light from within. For those who can set aside the desire to be entertained with broadly drawn action, there is glowing subtext and delicious tension throughout. Chevalier lets the characters be real--noble at times, disappointing at others--and though she doesn't tie up every loose end, she provides a resolution that is both satisfying and credible. My only complaint was that the ending came too soon as it tends to do with good fiction.

In addition to a good story well told, Girl With Pearl Earring is a remarkable intertwining of the historical with the fanciful. Chevalier's tale is exquisitely believable and lives in the yearning face of this most appealing model. I will never again look at the painting without feeling the marvelous resonance and possibilty of Griet's story.

99 of 105 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Linking the Tangible to a Story We'd Like to Believe..., April 9, 2000

By	David Kusumoto (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Girl With a Pearl Earring (Paperback)

"Girl With a Pearl Earring" is the first major novel I have read since John Irving's "The World According to Garp" more than 20 years ago. As a 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 is a rhythm of soft poetry 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 jarring, a 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?

58 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enchanting novel about the Dutch Mona Lisa., July 22, 2000

By	E. Bukowsky "booklover10" (NY United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Girl With a Pearl Earring (Paperback)

"Girl with a Pearl Earring," by Tracy Chevalier, is a story set in Delft, Holland in the 17th Century. A lovely sixteen-year-old named Griet, whose family has suffered financial setbacks, is sent to be a maidservant in the home of the great Dutch painter, Johannes Vermeer. Griet finds herself drawn to the world of Vermeer--a world of light, color, beauty and perfect composition. Griet shows an aptitude for understanding art and she gradually begins to assist Vermeer in his painting. Griet's involvement in Vermeer's art sets the stage for family conflict. (The title of the novel comes from a Vermeer painting that is known as the Dutch Mona Lisa because of the enigmatic young woman in the portrait.) This novel is a small gem and it is an immensely satisfying work of fiction. Chevalier perfectly captures the life of 17th Century Delft, with its sharp religious and class distinctions, and her nuanced dialogue and descriptive passages are beautifully textured. In fact, "Girl with a Pearl Earring" is like a Vermeer portrait. It is expressive, subtle and meaningful. I highly recommend this book for people who are fascinated by art and who enjoy historical fiction.