I loved this. I don't say that often enough about a book. I was impressed with the writing, completely invested in the story and pleased with the ending. It's not easy to tick all those boxes, especially in a relatively short story. What more can I say.

Thực sự mình chẳng biết viết gì sau khi đọc xong cuốn này cả. Mình thấy nó hay và đẹp, nhưng không chỉ ra được nó hay và đẹp ở chỗ nào. Ở mấy bức tranh? Ở ánh sáng chiếu qua cửa sổ tràn vào căn phòng vẽ? Ở những nếp gấp của tấm vải trên bàn? Ở chỗ màu mà cô hầu Griet lén trộn hàng đêm? Mình chịu thôi, mọi chi tiết đường nét cứ hòa vào nhau cả, màu thì chồng hết lên nhau, tình cảm cũng bị ẩn đi sao mà sâu quá, chỉ có chiếc hoa tai ngọc trai là còn sáng rõ mà thôi.

Love this story, love Vermeer's work. Over 2 years a quiet and obedient maid named Griet goes to live as a servant for Johannes Vermeer and his family. It is hard for Griet not to like this good and obedient protagonist, for she struggles with universal yearnings such as love and an escape from poverty. Her life is a fairly solitary one as she finds herself growing apart from her family while living as an outsider in another's home. The Vermeer family, with the exception of the painter himself, is not fond of the strange Protestant girl; and as Maria Thins, the grandmother, says, "Never so much trouble with a maid before." The real trouble comes, however, when the artist takes a liking to the young girl and allows her to assist him in his work. Griet is granted the privilege that no other family member has -- helping Vermeer in his studio. Not even his wife Catharina is allowed to enter the studio, so this arrangement causes a great deal of tension within the household. Griet begins her work by cleaning still life objects that Vermeer will paint later that day. She also is given the responsibility of grinding the paints and even purchasing the colors from the apothecary. As if these "privileges" were not causing enough disquietude within the family, matters only get worse when Vermeer agrees, at a friend's request, to paint Griet. The moments in which Vermeer paints Griet are the most spellbinding of the book. We feel Griet's nervous emotions as she sits as still as possible under the close eye of the awe-inspiring man she has grown to love. Her inner struggle is augmented by jealous Pieter, the butcher's son, who has made no secret of his intention to marry Griet. The young maid, however, seems devoted only to her master and obeys his every wish. When he tells her to wear his wife's pearl earrings for the painting, Griet agrees even though she knows it could lead to her downfall. (Also really liked the 2003 film starring Colin Firth and Scarlet Johansson.)

Vermeer (1632-1675) left no more than 36 paintings - and the attribution of a couple of those is in doubt - and no drawings. Vermeer was not a totally unsuccessful artist. He became a head of the Guild of St Luke in Delft and his paintings fetched high prices, but he died in debt, and his Catholic wife Catharina Bolnes had to declare herself bankrupt.

I wrote a paper on artistic expression using Girl with a Pearl Earring as a source, since it is a painting, a movie, and a book. It provided me fascinating fodder, a really good read, and a good grade on my paper. This is a wonderful study in repression and tiny details. There are some beautiful passages. I absolutely love the study done of the character of Vermeer. At one point, a character tells Griet (the imagined Girl with a Pearl Earring) to be careful, since Vermeer does not see her, but rather the painting that she will make. The artist sees the world only as paintings, not as people. This is shown as incredibly selfish. He loves only those things that fit into his sense of light and shape and color and tone. He has no interest in that which does not add to his work.

And it is for one reason only I will say that the movie was better than the book: that we are able to see his imaginings in front of him, rather than have them described. The movie was an endless series of portraits in motion, and a huge motif and focus on Vermeer's eyes. Colin Firth is known for his ability to play the quiet loner (see: Mr. Darcy) and it's brilliantly done here. Well cast, director. Well shot. It's one of my favorite movies. I do warn that it is incredibly quiet and intimate, and not a lot happens. Many people may be bored by it. But I think if you read this book in the first place you're the kind of person to like the movie.

A wonderful story, well told. Brings to life Delft in 1664. How accurate was the period described, I don’t know, but it came across as true. The description of time and place added a layer of texture to the story, without detracting or distracting. The Vermeer household and associated lifestyle was all the more believable because of how it fit into the various classes within Delft society: better off than some, but still clearly struggling to make ends meet. Griet’s relationships with the various people in her life, the changes in those relationships and the machinations of the Vermeer household make for an engaging story. The story is appropriately like a wonderful painting, rich in details and layers. The other thing I got from this novel: I looked at Vermeer’s paintings. Amazing. I knew nothing about him or his work before.

این کتابو دوست داشتم نه بخاطریوهان ورمر یا گرییت، بلکه بخاطر اینکه اطلاعات جالبی از قرن هفدهم هلند فهمیدم. اینکه مرئم زندگیشون چطور بوده، چطور فکر میکردن و صد البته بخاطر اینکه کم و بیش اطلاعاتی در مورد نقاشی و تابلوهای یوهان ورمر میداد.


****
واسم جالب بود که خیلی من این نقاشی رو دیده بودم ولی هیچ کنجکاوی بابتش نکرده بودم، بعد خوندن این کتاب در مورد این نقاشی کلی سرچ کردم و چیزای خیلی جالبی فهمیدم. یه فیلمم هست با این اسم اونم دانلود کردم هنوز ندیدمش ولی :دی

ولی سوال مهم اینه: عشق اونا دو طرفه بود یا یک طرفه؟

So the parts when Vermeer was actually being a painter were interesting. Seeing as I slogged through this on account of a recommendation that arose from an art-class lecture on Vermeer, I was hoping that the art stuff would at least deliver.

But it's not a good sign when a book's most compelling moments revolve around two people grinding pigments. And, no: "Grinding pigments" is not a euphemism for artist-bangin'. It is, quite literally, referring to the detailed descriptions of how paint was made in the days before those fancy metal tubes replaced pig bladders as the paint-storing vessels of choice.

This was the most predictable book I've read in a while, and that includes the two graphic-novel series that are simply retelling stories I know well in a new medium. I knew exactly where the plot was going within the book's first dozen pages. Every subsequent thread was introduced with the subtlety of a sledgehammer and the writerly finesse of a 14-year-old's first attempt at fanfiction.

It was also pretty obvious what stereotype everyone was going to play from his or her very first appearance. There really isn't a multi-dimensional character in this book. I understand that the first-person voice is a limited perspective by its nature, and I would write it off as just that if the peripheral characters were the only flat archetypes, but even the narrator doesn't carry any convincing weight. Griet is the protagonist because she's the main character. And because all of the characters with whom she has scuffles are inexplicably bitchy. Not giving characters any real motivations, not making them behave and interact believably, and generally preferring to tell rather than show all contributed to making this whole book feel sloppy, underdeveloped and rushed. If "Girl with a Pearl Earring" was maybe 200 more pages of really hammering out the story and its players, maybe then it'd be a more satisfying read. At least it's mercifully quick and mostly painless at its current length.

I say "mostly painless" because there are some groan-worthy lines showcased here: While more pages would have maybe benefited the plot, there is nothing -- save for a control-freak editor -- that could have improved the prose itself. I could not get past the clunky writing. It didn't take me long to get violently annoyed by the author's fondness for hitting the reader over the head with the most obvious attempts at subtle foreshadowing by way of forcing too much weight on these flimsy, laughably ominous one-sentence paragraphs. There were numerous other technical things that kept grating on me about the writing and its myriad shortcomings. Among them: Griet saying things like "I always regretted that decision" to indicate that she's looking back on a time that is very clearly written as the present; not one character shows any development throughout the novel; sixteen-year-old Griet, the daughter of a tile painter, somehow knows more about painting and composition than Vermeer, a professional artist who actually managed to garner some fame during his living years.

Even when the book pissed me off (which was often), I will admit that I never found Griet herself to be irritating (maybe because I kept fantasizing about Scarlett Johansson to save my brain from oozing through my ears?) -- but I was irked at how it felt like Chevalier was Mary Sue-ing her way through the character. The way that every man whom Griet encountered in the whole! damn! book! fawned over and flirted with her, the way she was presented as being uneducated but naturally clever just because she sometimes spoke her mind and separated her chopped veggies by color, the way Griet's family was painted as these simple, sheltered little Protestants who knew nothing of the world around them.... there was far too much black-or-white for me to take anything about the book seriously.

I don't care enough to write about this book any more. So. Every other gripe I have notwithstanding, here are three of the book's most glaring failures:

-- Vermeer, for being the central male character, remains an enigma. It's not that he's shrouded in an air of charming mystery but rather that his personality is nothing more than a bunch of suppositions that Griet "just knows" about him.

-- Griet does not ever refer to Vermeer as anything other than "he" or "him". Not. Once. It made her sound like a starstruck teenybopper and it undermined any sense of genuine affection between the painter and his maid.

-- The similes. Oh, dear sweet Baby Jesus, the similes. I now know that I have a limited tolerance for the number of trite comparisons of faces and voices to household objects that I encounter in one novel, all thanks to the time I spent reading this book.

I slowed my pace. Years of hauling water, wringing out clothes, scrubbing floors, emptying chamberpots, with no chance of beauty or color or light in my life, stretched before me like a landscape of flat land where, a long way off, the sea is visible but can never be reached. If I could not work with the colors, if I could not be near him, I did not know how I could continue to work in that house.

Poor Griet just wants to anchor herself in the orbit of Vermeer and his otherworldly (but also beautifully ordinary) paintings, but circumstances and even Vermeer himself will come to make that impossible.

Not much is known about Jan Vermeer's life. He married a woman from a wealthy family and converted to Catholicism (an unusual thing in 17th century Holland) and lived well, if beyond his means, for a time as a painter and art dealer. He lived in Delft, Holland all his life, rarely leaving it, and died in debt, exacerbated by the drop in patronage during the Franco-Dutch War, in 1675. He only painted 35 (or 34, depending who you read) paintings, with a few others whose attribution cannot be established.

Because we don't know a lot about Vermeer's life (and much less about most of the young women who sat for him), this is a fictionalized imagining of how one of his most famous paintings came to be.

When teenage Griet's father is blinded in an accident, she is sent to be a live-in maid at the Vermeer household. Life there isn't easy: Vermeer's wife takes an immediate disliking to her, one of the daughters is a malicious brat, the other maid resents her, Griet misses her family whom she now can only see on Sundays, the family is Catholic which her Protestant backbone finds vaguely distressing, and the work is back-breaking.

What makes it bearable are the paintings. Griet, the daughter of a tile painter, has an eye for light and color. As she learns to mix raw materials to make his pigments and watches his subjects evolve daily on the easel, they develop a kinship. Alas, this also sows the seeds of her eventual departure.

Poor Griet is too smart to be a maid and too lacking in other options. Like countless, nameless people throughout history, she is forced to work a job she hates and be entirely dependent on the capricious impulses of the wealthy. She is groped by Vermeer's patron, used as a pawn by Vermeer's mother-in-law, and ultimately seen as little more than a prop by Vermeer himself.

I wasn't sure while reading this if it was a three or four star read, but I feel this book is going to stay in my head for a while so four stars, what the heck.

The author's website has images of the paintings mentioned in this book.

The novel is the fictional story behind one of the most known paintings of Johannes Vermeer and it includes glimpses into the painter's life. I did not know of the existence of the painter before i read this novel, maybe because so few of his paintings are known. However, after I finished the book I started to search for Vermeer's work in museums and I admit they are special, he has a special gift for the light.

فضای ارومی داره و انگار داریم توی یک نقاشی امپرسیونیستی اروم اروم قدم میزنیم. نه قراره شوکه بشیم نه چیزی. ولی داستان اونقد قوی هست که مارو دنبال خودش بکشونه. لذت بر انگیز برای لم دادن کنار افتاب و فکر نکردن به هیچ چیز و دنبال کردن این ماجرای جالب!

Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Pinterest



n  I have read this book so many times. And even after re-reading this book so many times, it is and will always remain one of my favourite books, a story that is evergreen and has such an emotional story worth retelling.n

Tracy Chevalier has been inspired by the artwork of Johannes Vermeer, and his most famous painting, the Girl with a Pearl Earring, that she decided to write a story of what she believes might have happened behind that painting. For me, when looking at paintings, this is one of the things that cross my mind – what is the actual story behind it, what was the relationship between the painter and the people on the painting, what were they all thinking and what did their lives look like… In this book, we are able to enter this world, where we see a story of what might have happened here, and this story is a wonderful experience.

This is a story about Griet’s life. Griet lives in a house with her poor family, a blind dad who worked all his life to gather a bit of money for them, and a mother that always fought for the family. With their money running low, Griet has to go and work as a maid in the house of Vermeer, who is a famous painter. Even though quite young, Griet quickly knows her tasks, to iron, to cook, to grab groceries from the market, and the most important bit – to stay out of everyone’s way and do her job.

In the house, things are not easy. Griet is not treated with respect, her family is worried about her, the plague kills her sister and the butcher’s boy wants to marry her. Griet doesn’t feel anything for this boy, but having meat on the table every day for her and her family is too big of an advantage to be just thrown away. I personally never liked the butcher boy, because he knew very well what his advantage was, and he kept reminding Griet how she depends on him to feed her family.


n  ‘’Her words surprised me, but when I looked in her eyes and saw there the hunger for meat that a butcher’s son could provide, I understood why she had set aside her pride.’’n

But Griet has a secret crush on Mr. Vermeer, and a great admiration for his work. And Mr. Vermeer notices Griet’s curiosity and gives her tasks around the studio, which in the end, results in him painting her. Griet gets to be involved in his world, learning what he does, and working for him in secret, while his wife is bearing another child of his. Even though Griet secretly feels like she is betraying the wife, she can’t help but feel joj when Vermeer pays attention to her.

n  ‘’ The clothes soaking in the kitchen went cold, the water grey. Tanneke clattered in the kitchen, the girls shouted outside, and we behind closed door sat and looked at each other. And he painted.’’n

Now, in the 21st century, it is normal for ladies to pose, and be painted, but in that time, it was a disgrace for a maid to be painted. Men didn’t have the respect towards women as they do now (some of them). And when Griet finds herself being painted, she knows the consequences, but as a maid, she has no voice to object. She knows this quite well.

n  In the end, the story is very powerful and heartwarming. While we read about how Griet sees and thinks, we will start to love her, watch her grow, and learn so much. I am forever grateful I have found this book.n

I have read the 20th Anniversary Edition of this amazing book, which was kindly sent to me by the publishers, The Borough Press, and Love Reading UK, in exchange for my honest review.

Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Pinterest

Delicato come una pennellata, intenso come il blu oltremare. L’arte e la narrazione di mescolano come olio e pigmenti, rivelando mille sfumature: i quadri di Vermeer prendono vita, si rivelano, diventano i personaggi di contorno alla protagonista.
Visto le poche informazioni che abbiamo sulla vita del pittore, questa è una bellissima leggenda a cui è un piacere credere.

La storia della nascita del quadro più famoso di Vermeer ci viene raccontata dalla sua modella.
Siamo nel 1664. Griet è una giovane donna, figlia di un decoratore di piastrelle protestante di Delft. Obbligata dalle circostanze economiche precarie della famiglia, si vede costretta a lasciarla per andare a servizio presso un’altra più agiata: quella cattolica del pittore Jan Vermeer.

Griet china la testa e accetta il suo destino. Lavora duramente, sostituisce la fantesca Tanneke nelle mansioni più faticose, cerca di mantenere salda la sua fede, resiste ai dispetti di una delle figlie del pittore, sopporta le angherie di sua moglie e si ammanta di un timore reverenziale verso il suo padrone, il quale l’ha incaricata di pulire l’atelier in cui dipinge.

Così la sua esistenza si divide in due: fuori dalla casa c’è la vita vera, la sua famiglia e il figlio del macellaio che le fa la corte. Dentro, invece, nell’atelier, c’è un mondo ovattato fatto di silenzi e pose; è il luogo più gelido dell’abitazione ma nonostante questo Griet ne ricava sempre un gran calore, soprattutto quando c’è il suo padrone con lei. Non sa perchè. Sa solo che lì si sente libera.

Si tiene tutto dentro, Griet, dalle grida ai sospiri. I suoi gesti sono cadenzati e misurati tanto più è grande la passione che la muove. Dietro le gote pallide del viso sempre chino sulle faccende domestiche brucia un fuoco, scarlatto come i capelli che tiene segregati sotto la cuffia e che non mostra mai a nessuno.

Ma Griet non è soltanto una domestica. Ha un’anima artistica, va oltre le apparenze, sa cogliere il significato dei dettagli. Vermeer se ne accorge.
Si nutre del talento della ragazza tanto da volerla come aiutante nel suo atelier, tanto da affidarle la macinatura dei colori, tanto da interessarsi al suo parere così come il più facoltoso dei mecenati di Vermeer – Van Ruijven – si interessa alla sua bellezza carnale e gli ordina un suo ritratto, a tutti i costi.

Griet e Vermeer si trovano costretti ad accontentarlo, in segreto. Passano ore a guardarsi negli occhi senza dirsi niente, rivelando tutto. Superano insieme la linea che non avrebbero dovuto nemmeno calpestare, e così facendo consegnano alla storia un quadro perfetto e iconico.
Ma certe scelte si trascinano dietro conseguenze inevitabili. E il destino di Griet, ancora una volta, viene messo in gioco.