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Girl in Hyacinth Blue |
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 Girl in Hyacinth Blue bySusan Vreeland MacMurray & Beck 242 pages, 1999 ISBN 1878448900 Reviewed by Nancy Mehl Read our interview by Nancy Mehl Nominated in the Fiction Category for the ABA's BookSense Award. (Winners TBA in June 2000). Also nominated for the Western States Art Federation's Book of the Year Award. -- "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." So ends Susan Vreeland’s novel, Girl in Hyacinth Blue. Yet in this touching, beautifully written novel, the end is the beginning. The story revolves around a painting - but not just any painting. A possible Vermeer. There are thirty-five known Vermeers in the world. Could this be another? Each chapter is a story in itself. The single thread running through the lives of each person and each family, is an extraordinary painting of a young girl in a blue smock sitting at a table, gazing out an open window. The painting’s backward journey begins with Cornelius Englebrecht, a mathematics teacher who is tortured by the fact that his father took the painting from the home of Jewish owners who were being rounded up and sent to German camps – and to their deaths. To him, the girl in hyacinth blue is a mirror of his own guilt. To Aletta Pieters, a girl whose life has been a nightmare of abuse and pain - she is the reflection of everything she can never be. And the life she will never have. ‘She looked up to the painting imploringly. "You think that somewhere girls actually live like that – just sitting so peaceful like?"’ To Magdalena, the subject of the enchanting painting – it is a picture of a girl whose father saw her only as the object of his artistic passion. Not as the beloved daughter she desperately wanted to be. This is a novel that should be read slowly – inhaled deeply and experienced fully. It deserves to be kept in your possession as a valuable treasure. Susan Vreeland’s writing reproduces the same kind of artistry found in the painting she writes about. Girl in Hyacinth Blue is a definite masterpiece. |
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