[.ca] Girl in Hyacinth Blue (ISBN 1565115449)

From Amazon.com:
There are only 35 known Vermeers extant in the world today. In Girl in Hyacinth Blue, Susan Vreeland posits the existence of a 36th. The story begins at a private boys' academy in Pennsylvania where, in the wake of a faculty member's unexpected death, math teacher Cornelius Engelbrecht makes a surprising revelation to one of his colleagues. He has, he claims, an authentic Vermeer painting, "a most extraordinary painting in which a young girl wearing a short blue smock over a rust-colored skirt sat in profile at a table by an open window." His colleague, an art teacher, is skeptical and though the technique and subject matter are persuasively Vermeer-like, Engelbrecht can offer no hard evidence--no appraisal, no papers--to support his claim. He says only that his father, "who always had a quick eye for fine art, picked it up, let us say, at an advantageous moment." Eventually it is revealed that Engelbrecht's father was a Nazi in charge of rounding up Dutch Jews for deportation and that the picture was looted from one doomed family's home: That's when I saw that painting, behind his head. All blues and yellows and reddish brown, as translucent as lacquer. It had to be a Dutch master. Just then a private found a little kid covered with tablecloths behind some dishes in a sideboard cabinet. We'd almost missed him. By the end of "Love Enough," this first of eight interrelated stories tracing the history of "Girl in Hyacinth Blue," the painting's fate at the hands of guilt-riddled Engelbrecht fils is in question. Unfortunately, there is no doubt about the probable destiny of the previous owners, the Vredenburg family of Rotterdam, who take center stage in the powerful "A Night Different From All Other Nights." Vreeland handles this tale with subtlety and restraint, setting it at Passover, the year before the looting, and choosing to focus on the adolescent Hannah Vredenburg's difficult passage into adulthood in the face of an uncertain future. In the next story, "Adagia," she moves even further into the past to sketch "how love builds itself unconsciously ... out of the momentous ordinary" in a tender portrait of a longtime marriage. Back and back Vreeland goes, back through other owners, other histories, to the very inception of the painting in the homely, everyday objects of the Vermeer household--a daughter's glass of milk, a son's shirt in need of buttons, a wife's beloved sewing basket--"the unacknowledged acts of women to hallow home." Girl in Hyacinth Blue ends with the painting's subject herself, Vermeer's daughter Magdalena, who first sends the portrait out into the world as payment for a family debt, then sees it again, years later at an auction. She thought of all the people in all the paintings she had seen that day, not just Father's, in all the paintings of the world, in fact. Their eyes, the particular turn of a head, their loneliness or suffering or grief was borrowed by an artist to be seen by other people throughout the years who would never see them face to face. People who would be that close to her, she thought, a matter of a few arms' lengths, looking, looking, and they would never know her. In this final passage, Susan Vreeland might be describing her own masterpiece as well as Vermeer's. --Alix Wilber

charged with life:
GIRL IN HYACINTH BLUE is one of the best bets for a summer read that you're going to find anywhere. Susan Vreeland and has written a small and lovely gem of a book. Through eight vignettes, we travel through the life of a Vermeer painting. From the present day owner, we travel back to meet various owners of this painting, and the affect this painting had on all of them. The stories set in Holland were especially beautifully written and among my favorites. I also greatly enjoyed the depiction of the inspiration for the painting. A little book, but one that truly touched me. Also recommended: THE BARK OF THE DOGOWOD.

Thirty-five or thirty-six?:
Johannes Vermeer, the great Dutch painter of long ago, didn't alway sign his work. As of date, there are alledgedly thirty-five definitive paintings. From time to time others have appeared only to be found to be fakes. Given this, the author has proposed that there are now thirty-six of these gems, and this is where the book takes off. The story is really a collection of short stories (the way McCrae uses the technique in his "Bark of the Dogwood") and each one concerns itself with the "immaginary" painting by Vermeer titled GIRL IN HYACINTH BLUE. The author uses this painting to bind together the stories by telling us about the different people who have owened this alledged work. She begins in the 1990s and goes backwards in time. This fast-moving and ingenious work is bound to catch you off guard and of all the books I've read recently, this one was one of the more unusual. If you like the idea of this book, you might also enjoy two other books I've recently come across. The first is "The Jane Austen Book Club" and the second is "The Bark of the Dogwood." Both unique and entertaining.

Sweet and Poignant:
Is it a Vermeer or isn't it? That is the thread that holds these eight short stories together. Susan Vreeland takes us on a journey back in time that starts with the current owner of a beautiful painting thought to be one of the lost paintings of the Dutch artist Vermeer. As we approach each sub-story we travel back a little further in time to each previous owner of the painting and how owning it has affected their lives. Set mostly in Holland and The Netherlands the Dutch names for places can be a bit difficult to pronounce but do not detract from the overall power of this small book. Each individual story line is easy to follow. My only question would be what ultimately happens to the current owner of the painting (who is afraid to show it to the world since his father obtained it through his position with the German police during WW II). I highly recommend this book. Marion Marchetto

Disappointing:
Perhaps I wanted to find some of the delight I feel when I look at a Vermeer painting or reproduction of one. But instead I found a technically accomplished work which overall relentlessly focussed on the 'brutal facts of life', which has so little to do with the qualities of love, beauty, light and mysterious intimacy which I find in Vermeer's work. A depressing and disappointing read.

A slow start:
Girl in Hyacinth Blue in my opinion was a dull book. It started off slow and it never held my attention. After a certain point I no longer knew what I was reading since I found the book to be too dull.