Witching Review: Girl with a pearl earring by Tracy Chevalier

I have decided to add a new category to my blog! From now on, I am going to write witching reviews! I want to share all the things I come across while crafting around on my little piece of historical fiction. I want to share the novels I read to think myself into different eras, all the informative books I read and maybe at some point I‘ll even do movies. If you love to read, have a thing for history and like to now and then find a little escape rout from this world, I hope that this category will be one where you can find new impulses.

Maybe, this is a bit short for a review, but on here, I want to suggest books as spoiler free as possible.

I am going to start with a novel that means something to me for many different reasons. One of those reasons is that I was fairly young when I first read it. So young that I could not even read the English original at the time, but had to read a German translation, since I was only 11 years old.
Another reason is even more personal: It‘s the only interest me, my mother, and my grandmother ever shared all together. It‘s a book the three of us have read, and that although each of us is such a different version of woman that usually only conflicts connect us. I remember a ride on a train to a big and stressful family gathering that we three spent talking about the novel, and as I already mentioned, for us, those connections are a rare thing.
The last reason is that I love the painting and the painter this book is about. It reminds me of trips into the Netherlands, which in all honesty is not a far trip for me, and of visiting beautiful cities and museums while eating something sweet.

The novel I am going to review in this post is called „Girl with a pearl earring“ and was written by Tracy Chevalier.
It tells the story of Griet, a girl who at the age of 16 starts working as a maid at the house of the painter Vermeer, where she soon takes over the sensible task of cleaning his studio inbetween his painting sessions. The painter soon notices her sense for the way he works and gives her more and more important tasks, until she will even become the face of the famous painting „Girl with a pearl earring“.

I really loved the idea of imagining the story behind this painting. It is not known who the girl actually was. This riddle combined with her turban looking rather peculiar for the late 17th century in the Netherlands, it seems as if the existence of the painting is asking for a tale to be imagined, doesn‘t it?

Throughout the novel, the reader follows Griet into a world usually out of reach for a woman of a poor family. She learns about how colours and light work, and has to watch each step she takes and word she says to avoid a scandal that would end any future she might have. While following her steps, the reader can explore so many details about the life in a Dutch city in the 1660s.
In one of my favourite moments, Griet and Vemeer even discuss her protestant world view compared to his catholic one, while looking at a painting. It allows us to look inside the head of a clever, yet poor and uneducated girl in the early modern era, and let’s us understand her struggle in finding her place in this world.

The authenticity of Chevaliers writing is astonishing in all her works, which makes her one of my favourite historical fiction writers. Still, I sometimes struggle with the endings, and with the peaceful acceptance the characters show towards their fate. Then again, this also is what I praise about her writing: It opens a window into the past and let‘s the reader follow characters as authentic is they were sitting right in front of them.