Girl With a Pearl Earring

Girl With a Pearl Earring-Tracy Chevalier

How I found this book: I really only found out about this book because I have this unreasonable attraction to Colin Firth. When I found out the movie was a book, I thought, hey, why not give it a whirl, it might explain a lot that the movie…well just doesn’t. But damn, I like Colin Firth.

Setting: Delft, the Netherlands, the same time period and place practically as Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. I swear, it’s a complete coincidence.

Main Characters:

Griet: A wide-eyed, sixteen year old Protestant girl who is sent to work for the Vermeer household after her family falls on hard times. She has an eye for color, for the sensual, and for placement, all the makings of a great lover of art. She sees it as more than pictures, but has a hard time expressing or understanding it, something she learns while working with the Master. She is painfully shy, very naïve, and very attracted to Vermeer. She is the model for Girl with a Pearl Earring.

Johannes Vermeer: He is a real-life Dutch painter, famous for his Girl with a Pearl Earring, he is a complex man, with a particular view of the world that doesn’t allow him to see much else. He is in love with art, and it seems he’s very much absorbed in it, which draws a large divide between himself and his wife and ever-growing family.

Maria Thins: Vermeer’s wily and capable mother-in-law, she seems to be the true ‘lady’ of the house and helps him run his business interests. While not unkind, she is shrewd and pays attention to the bottom line. She is the calm, capable foil to her excitable daughter, Catharina.

Catharina Vermeer: Vermeer’s excitable, shrewish wife, she is not allowed into the world of her husband, both because her personality doesn’t suite for it, and because she doesn’t see the world as he does. This leads to jealousy and suspicion on her part. She is particularly resentful of Griet from the start, and seems to occupy her time playing at being the lady of the house and producing a large amount of children.

Cornelia Vermeer: One of the many Vermeer daughter’s, she is mean-spirited and very watchful. She too takes a dislike to Griet.

Pieter the son: The son of the Vermeer’s butcher, he is in love with Griet and is actively looking to court her.

Van Riujven: Vermeer’s patron, a lecherous, rich man who desires Griet, and wants Vermeer to paint her.


Plot: In this supposition on the inspiration of the famous Girl with a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier tells us the story of Griet, a simple Protestant Dutch girl who goes to work in the Catholic home of the Vermeer’s. A family tragedy sends her across town, and while it isn’t far from her childhood home, it might as well have been across the world. Becoming a maid, she must deal with the querulous demands put on her by the mistress of the house, Catharina, and maneuver between her and her much more sage and shrewd mother, Maria. However, Griet learns the most from her experience as she begins assisting the Master himself, and begins to see the world through newly opened and changed eyes. But her broken and dependent family still waits for her outside of the Vermeer household, and a young man promises to gives her the key to assisting them and return her to her simple, Calvinist roots. Torn between the world she admires, and the world she belongs to, Griet becomes the subject of one of the Master’s most famous paintings, knowing that it could be her ruin.

Themes:

Discovering how to ‘see’ the world: One of the things that Griet learns at the hands of Vermeer is how to see the world, not just with the eyes, but with all the senses. He shows her not just to see a simple cloud, but to see the all the colors that make up that cloud. This opens the whole palette his paintings up to Griet, and she can see his talent and what he brings to the art. But she has trouble describing the transcendent quality to her very solid, Protestant family. It is as if she’s been given the key to a private paradise that she can not share with those she cares for.

Admiration/love: There is a lot of mixing of the ideas of admiration, in the sense of admiring someone’s skills, admiring how someone looks, and love. Vermeer’s lecherous patron, Vermeer, and Griet herself seem to suffer from the mixture of the ideas. Griet in particular allows herself to fall in love with her Master, knowing that he’s above her, and knowing that it would be scandalous, but harbors a private admiration for him all the same. It is perhaps common for the young and the artistic to do so, but it comes out looking very naïve and shallow.

The vision of the artist: Vermeer sees the world in ways that differ from most people, especially that of his wife. While his mother-in-law perhaps understands it best, she is a raw businesswoman, seeking to take care of her daughter’s growing and expanding family. She tries to be as understanding as possible without pushing, seeing the talent in her son-in-law, but even she grows impatient with him. Catharina, his wife, seems to see or understand little if anything of his talent or his work. For her, her world is confined to the house and children, something he takes little to no part in. She resents Griet who moves from the sphere of her domain to that of her husbands, a world that she is strictly barred from. Only Griet in the story seems to fully understand the way that Vermeer looks at the world, and even she can’t really bring herself to totally be a part of it. Her sensibilities and cultural moirés stand in the way for her, as they do not do for him, (in one particular passage when she brings up her Protestant distrust of paintings, he mentions that he himself was raised Protestant). In the end, it seems that only Vermeer himself can fully understand the way he sees the world.

Every book sucks somewhere: I had hoped this book would give greater insight into the movie…it turns out not so much. In fact, the book only left me asking myself “What’s the point?” Honestly, yes, it’s a story of a girl coming of age, about learning about the sensuality of the world and how to see it, and I get the whole forbidden, secret romance thing. But other than that, really, what is the point. Yes, I can see Chevalier building up a character that, if you are an art historian you could totally see as being the inspiration for Girl with a Pearl Earring. But otherwise, we are stuck with two-hundred pages of Griet being nervous, curious, and terrified…and by the strangest things.

That was my other problem with the book, I felt no connection or understanding with the main character. She gets worked up over things I don’t understand, she is worried by the idea of Pieter the son being interested in her, when most girls should be thrilled. I am sure there is a reason for it, but Chevalier never goes into it and sort of glosses it over with Griet’s stand-offishness and lukewarm allowances of a couple of copped feels. And she never explains Griet’s weirdness about her hair sufficiently, save to say that Griet feels it’s perhaps wicked. I’m sure there’s a good, strong Protestant reason for this, (being raised Southern Baptist, I know we are kooky!), but it’s never explained, and I’m left to ask myself, umm…so what?

And then there is Catharina, Vermeer’s excitable, bitchy wife. God, the woman should have just been slapped, if I were her mother I would have. But no one sees fit to do it, leaving her to pop out kids and act like a hoyden whenever it suites her. Perhaps it was to give a foil to the dreamy, artistic Vermeer? See how he suffers for his art? Course, he could have just stopped aiding her in the popping out kids business. It’s called post-partum depression man, honestly. In any case, I found Catharina more of an irritant than a plot device, and kept wishing something would just fall on either her or her equally delightful daughter, Cornelia. And it’s never explained why they are bitchy or what their justification is, just that they are.

Long and the short, the book is painfully thin, (both literally and figuratively), on any character or story development. This may be because Chevalier is attempting to tell the story through Griet’s limited vision, but because of that, I got to the end of the book and asked myself repeatedly, “OK, so what was the point of this again?”

I am beginning to distrust New York Times bestsellers. Gah.

What did I like: Well, I did like the premise. I thought the idea of seeing the inspiration behind the famous painting would be fun. And I like Griet’s perceptions of Vermeer and his approach to work. Really though, those were my only likes, I was a bit disappointed in it.

How would I rate this wormy book: I would rate this book a LITTLE WORM, it has a very interesting premise, but very little interesting beyond that, and it does little more than tell a story with no real point. It’s little better than sitting in an art history lecture and hearing an interesting anecdote on the story, the only different being that it is an anecdote from the perspective of the model for the painting. But then, last time I looked on my degree, I have a history degree and not an art history degree, so perhaps I wouldn’t know. Either way, I was very disappointed with this book. Still, it’s work a read on a lazy afternoon, but not really worth more than that.