Rating: 
Summary: An inside peek into history and art
Review: Griet was a subtle, quiet and sometimes submissive girl. You will follow her as she tries to bring honor and money to her family. While blessed with a strange beauty that men take to she still seems unaware of her power as a women, perhaps because the women she lives with as servant are so demanding and cruel. This book is a very subtle read. I read it with a book club and the different points we picked up on were amazing. If you're looking for a book to discuss, this one will fit the bill. Never offensive, always touching, sometimes even leaving you begging for soemthing more to happen between this girl and the people in her life, paticularily her master Vermeer, this is a great story. Much detail is given to the paintings and the manner in which they were painted, so I recommend you read with a book on Vermeer close by. You will learn something about art, human nature, and even a bit on the historical class structure.
Rating:
Summary: Linking the Tangible to a Story We'd Like to Believe...
Review: Back in 2000, "Girl With a Pearl Earring" became one of the first major novels I had read since John Irving's "The World According to Garp" more than 25 years ago. As an ex-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's a soft rhythm 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 a little jarring, a mild 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?
Rating: 
Summary: A swell book
Review: I can say that Chevalier has succeeded in creating a new personal favorite. She took a time in history not often investigated through fiction (but obviously worthy of it) and created a writing masterpiece. The description she makes of the paintings has inspired me to become a small-scale art enthusiast. She doesn't use large amounts of dialogue. She resides to the personal thoughts a single girl. It is refreshing to also have a book where the lead character is a teenager. Although it is with completely different circumstances I felt a better connection being a girl of sixteen as well. At the end you give a "Wow that was great!" sigh. It makes you re-examine parts of the world around you and take a new appreciation for all small details, thoughts, and creative behaviors. It is nothing short of wonderful.
Rating:
Summary: A believable and moving account
Review: When her father is blinded in an accident and no longer able to support his family, 16-year-old Griet is hired as a maid by the painter Vermeer and his jealous, egocentric, and frequently pregnant wife. Griet's responsibilities in the house are legion, and her tasks rendered more difficult by the unkindness of several of her new home's inhabitants. When Vermeer adopts her as an assistant in his studio--and subsequently determines to paint her--interpersonal relations below stairs are only worsened. Tracy Chevalier has written a believable and moving account--or imagining--of the creation of Vermeer's "Girl with a Pearl Earring," the painting which graces the cover of the paperback. The genius of the book lies in Chevalier's investing the act of painting Griet with a dark significance one would not imagine it to possess. There is in Griet's modeling for Vermeer the potential for tragedy, and in the painter's final brushstrokes a form of abuse. Communicating this significance to readers--and imagining this history of the painting in the first place--is quite an accomplishment.
Rating:
Summary: This book itself is a pearl!
Review: I'm not quite finished with it, but I've found every page thus far to be a marvel. Chevalier's polished lack of self-consciousness and sentimentality makes this book as fresh and crisp as the aprons in which young Griet takes pride in spotlessly maintaining. Vermeer's household becomes its own self-contained, small nation, with rich details of its geography and features, delicious fly-on-the-wall vistas of political maneuvering, speechless reverence for its beauty and royalty, and the brutality and instability of life among its poor. Griet herself is a masterpiece -- a keenly street-smart heroine carefully painted using only the media of the time -- mercifully absent of the sullen, contemptuous self-obsession and insatiable needs for attention exhibited by contemporary teens in our culture. I can't wait to rent the movie! I look forward to seeing Scarlet Johansson animate Griet.
Rating:
Summary: Out of the Ordinary
Review: This novel by Tracy Chevalier is definitely one out of the ordinary. Chevalier depicts the life in 17th century Holland with a radiance unimaginable. She crosses the line on fiction and the historical wonder, Vermeer. With every page turned, one wonders how new maid, Griet, will survive her days working for a catholic family and what painting her master, Johannes Vermeer, with brush up next for the city of Delft.
Chevalier captures the true meaning of art and spiritual infulence in this golden novel. She concocts a story of the beginning of one of the world's finest paintings, into the epic of an entire time period. Devour this New York Times best seller and experience the rapture of one girl's path through life.
Rating: 
Summary: Wondering what all the fuss is about...
Review: I don't read much literary fiction, mainly because much of it is more about the style with which the novel is written or the allegories or hidden meanings which readers are supposed to detect, cleverly hidden as they are among the novel's usually rather thin storyline. When I read fiction, I read it for the emotional involvement with the characters, and thus my preference is for authors who can invoke emotion with their words. The reviews carried on this book's jacket appear to promise such emotional involvement: we are told that it is 'haunting' and 'magical', 'unbearably poignant' and 'steeped in atmosphere'. Maybe it's me, but I didn't see any of that. What I did see was a not-very-well-fleshed-out story about a young Dutch girl with an unusual fascination with colours and imagery, employed to work as a maid in the household of the seventeenth-century painter Vermeer. The household is fraught with traps for the unwary, where no matter what she says Griet may end up in trouble with someone. And yet through all of this, for a character we are meant to believe is uncertain, alarmed, unsure of her status, Griet appears remarkably calm and even capable. She chooses meat better than the household's existing cook; she can even cook better, too! And she can apparently teach Vermeer himself how to give his paintings that extra touch they need to make them unique. But it is the emotions which are the least convincing. Chevalier always tells, rather than shows, when it comes to Griet's emotions. For instance, Griet is subject to the lecherous desires of van Ruijven, and also to his stolen touches. She tells us (very briefly) that she dislikes it, but the few mentions are very dispassionate. Even more emotionless is Griet's courtship with Pieter the butcher. In the accounts of the time they spend together, it appears as if Griet barely tolerates him - and yet this relationship appears to be serious. With Pieter she experiences her first kiss, and this barely rates a mention; more intimacy is described as if the narrator is a detached, uninterested observer rather than the active participant. In fact, the whole book feels written from a perspective of emotional detachment. I didn't find myself caring about the characters at all, which led to a sense of scepticism about the interest which Vermeer himself is supposed to show in Griet - whether real or just as the potential subject of a painting - and about Griet herself as a credible character. Whether I would have finished the book had I not been reading it to while away a train journey I don't know, but it certainly didn't interest me enough to consider re-reading it, or going to see the film. wmr-uk
Rating: 
Summary: Fatuous, plodding, clumsy
Review: This book is sentimental clap-trap from an amateurish historical imagination addicted to forced and ill-considered metaphors. It's the first book I've ever actually thrown in the garbage.
Rating:
Summary: Maids, Paint, and INTRIGUE
Review: In my experience, sometimes historical fiction can be extremely tedious. In this case, it's absolutely amazing. I was never really interested in art, or the Netherlands, until I read this book. I had never heard of Johannes Vermeer, but this story gives you some insight into what he could have been like.It is a wonderful story but it has an air of mystery and illusion that can be confusing.Itis is the tale of a simple girl named Griet who becomes a maid in the painter Vermeer's home. The cook hates her for being a more thorough maid than she; Vermeer's wife Catharina is jealous of a maid being allowed into her husband's studio; Maria Thins, the painter's mother, is a shrewd bussinesswoman and always watching Griet wherever she goes. It is in this hostile enviornment that she begins to bond with her master, eventually becoming his assistant as her subtle changes help him finish his work.
This story is a picture in itself, a portrait of varying emotions: elation, as Griet discovers what it means to be a true artist; lust, as painter and muse create a bond that may exist outside of the art they create; and degrees of simmering jealousy as those outside the studio become angry with Griet for entering a place they are not allowed to go and can never seem to reach. The strange thing about the main character is that despite all of the emotion swirling around her, she retains an air of calm, as if such things are expected in the life of a maid. Even though the story is narrated in first person,her attitude makes me wonder who she really is and what she's really thinking of the odd events in her life.
Rating:
Summary: I saw the movie before reading the book.
Review: I never read a book after seeing the movie. But after seeing Girl with a Pearl Earring, I had to read the book. I am an artist and am thrilled at the interest in Vermeer paintings that has occured since the book and the movie was made. I visited the Metropolitian in New York City in March and had to wait to view his paintings as there were many groups surrounding them.
I loved the book and it renewed my interest in Vermeer. I am now reading my third book about him
| 
