Susan Vreeland 1999
A simple painting of a girl with a hyacinth blue shawl innocently gazing out the window is the subject of this outstanding novel. Is this painting a Vermeer? In a very smartly done chronologically reversed format, spanning in time from the present in New York City to the next in World War II Amsterdam and so on, until the last setting back to the original time of the art's creation between 1665-1668 Delft, each short chapter tells the different story of each of the painting's most previous owner. As the painting passes from one hand to another and affects and transforms each owner, the story also gives us a glimpse of the changing landscape of the Netherlands. The novel comes together in the end when the artist and the art's inspiration also tell their own tale.
'Cornelius Engelbrecht invented himself. Let me emphasize, straight away, that he isn't what I would call a friend, but I know him enough to say that he did purposely design himself: single, modest dresser in receding colors, mathematics teacher, sponsor of the chess club, mild-mannered acquaintance to all rather than a friend to any, a person anxious to be invisible.(opening lines)
'You've got to see opportunities and seize them on the spot. That's how it's done. Or, if a quick move isn't expedient, make a plan.(16)
'The one thing he craved, to be believed, struck at odds with the thing he most feared, to be linked by blood with his century's supreme cruelty. He'd have to risk exposure for the pure pleasure of delighting with another, now that his father has gone, in the luminescence of her eye. To delight for a day, and then to free himself. A promise.'(28)
"Everybody works... That's what life is . Work and a little play and a lot of prayer."(45)
'Now it became clear to her what made her love the girl in the painting. It was her quietness. A painting, after all, can't speak. Yet she felt this girl, sitting inside a room but looking out, was probably quiet by nature, like she was... Her face told her she probably wanted something so deep or so remote that she never dared breathe it but was thinking about it there by the window. And not only wanted. She was capable of doing some great wild loving things.'(51)
'It was strange: When you reduced even a fledgling love affair to its essentials-- I loved her, she maybe loved me, I was foolish, I suffered-- it became vacuous and trite, meaningless to anyone else. In the end, it's only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments.'(71)
'Remember no wrongs.'(75)
'How love builds itself unconsciously... out of the momentous ordinary.'(80)
'If there was anything to weep for, it wasn't Gerard or Monsieur le C--, or even me. It was the painting, for now it would go forth through the years without its certification, an illegitimate child, and all illegitimacy, whether of painting or of children or of love, ought to be a source of truer tears than any I could muster at parting.'(107)
'What was it all for? To have excitement about life, about life together, about a farm and a new kind of crop that would feed the whole world, and then to see it dissolve into only work, work, and tiny, growing separations. How does it all hold together?(148)
"Why does the world need another painting of a woman alone in a room? Or a hundred more paintings?"(204)
"The world doesn't know all that it needs yet," Pieter said, "but there will come a time when another of your paintings of a woman by a window will provide something."(204)
'In a moment she lifted her face to his, her cheeks rosy with shame. Regret glazing her eyes softened him. She stood before him as if offered by God. The blue cloth of her smock draped like billowy sky. There was something in this girl he could never grasp, an inner life inscrutable to him, He was in awe of the child's flight of fancy, her insatiable passion always to be running off somewhere, her active inner life. To still it for a moment, long enough to paint, for eternity, ah.(220)
'If two people love the same thing, she reasoned, then they must love each other, at least a little, even if they never say it.'(235)
a Penguin Book edition 2000
242 pages
Book owned
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