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"Girl With a Pearl Earring" by Tracy Chevalier, "The Music Lesson" by Katharine Weber and "Girl in Hyacinth Blue" by Susan Vreeland | page 1, 2
Less obviously "about" Vermeer than Chevalier's novel, "The Music Lesson" takes the form of Patricia's diary entries after Mickey seduces her into his plot to ransom a Vermeer on behalf of an IRA splinter group. They settle on a choice painting from "Betty Windsor's" collection, whose theft and smuggling Weber conveys in tense, breathtaking detail. Violence and treachery inevitably emerge, with Patricia feeling "deeply sick, hot, cold," at each revelation of duplicity. "Betrayal," she announces, "is a body blow to the soul."
Buy Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier at B&N.com
Buy The Music Lesson by Katharine Weber at B&N.com
Buy Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland at B&N.com
Superbly stylish (Weber has an extraordinary ear for the varied cadences of Irish speech, and her writing about sex is refreshingly non-trivial and to the point), "The Music Lesson" is nonetheless a touch more didactic than "Girl With a Pearl Earring," laden as it is with quotations from Walter Benjamin and snippets of mass-market psychologizing: "Mickey was someone I had invented for my own needs ... He had invented me to suit himself." Yet it, too, addresses the vexing issues that simmer beneath the surface of beloved creations of the imagination, whether on wood panels or in flesh, with intelligence and panache. Susan Vreeland's lovely "Girl in Hyacinth Blue" brings together an even more artfully constructed narrative -- a kind of Chinese box unfolding from the contemporary hiding-place of a painting attributed to Vermeer all the way back to the moment the work was conceived -- with subject matter that is, for the most part, achingly humble and quotidian. The novel starts off on a lofty note, with university professors debating issues of penance and redemption, and the confession of a former Nazi on his deathbed: "I only joined because of the opportunity to make lifelong friendships with people on the rise." Here, too, issues of lust and possession come to the fore, as the painting's owner furtively caresses his prize: "He stroked her neck and was surprised he could not grasp the tie string hanging from her cap. And then her shoulder, and he was astonished he could not feel its roundness ..." The further back the narrative travels in time, the more simply human the issues under examination become -- and the more intricate the thematic counterpoint as the painting is variously bartered, stolen or given away. There are heartbreaking stories of a Jewish family in occupied Amsterdam, sacrificing their much-loved carrier pigeons and celebrating their last Passover together, and of a wild young woman burned as a witch in 18th century Delfzijl, her baby abandoned to the mercy of a poor but respectable family. The novel ends as Vermeer's daughter Magdalena returns home following an auction of her father's work, Vreeland's prose mirroring the shimmering, mesmerizing depth of the master's canvases: She walked away slowly along a wet stone wall that shone iridescent, and the wetness of the street reflected back the blue of her best dress. Water spots appeared fast, turning the cerulean to deep ultramarine, Father's favorite blue. Light rain pricked the charcoal green canal water into delicate, dark lace, and she wondered if it had ever been painted just that way, or if the life of something as inconsequential as a water drop could be arrested and given to the world in painting, or if the world would care. Magdalena thinks back to her portrait in the auction: "People ... would be that close to her ... a matter of a few arms' lengths, looking, looking, and they would never know her." Just as Vermeer's paintings speak so powerfully, nearly four centuries after their creation, of the mysteries of character and time and of the trifling details that make up a life, so do these three novels, haunted by the artist's ghostly presence, trouble the soul and engage the mind.
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