…a little more time in childhood…

Book review:

     Girl With A Pearl Earring

by Tracy Chevalier

New York: PLUME, The Penguin Group, 1999

Girl with a Pearl Earring is a slim offering of compelling historical fiction about Johannes Vermeer’s enigmatic portrait of an unknown young girl, circa 1665.

It’s a breathtaking, tantalizing love story…tantalizing because Vermeer and the maid, Griet, almost embrace their passion, each stepping over the line without transgression, but not without hurt.

Vermeer, the worldly one, the master in a house filled with the baleful women of his family, tempted to the edge of the precipice…

Griet, the child innocent, heedless of her woman’s heat, trespassing unaware and ever nearer to the mystery that she barely understands in the beginning…

She becomes the girl with a pearl earring. She feels the lush weight of the earring, his fingertip sears her skin, she inclines toward his touch, trembles with a disembodied, virginal start of pain…

She sits for him.

He trembles—a long moment—with the rush of desire, masters it, and steps back to his easel, granting her a little more time in the childhood she is leaving behind, giving her a peace that will become a bereavement, a keening memory…

They look at each other, mute, apart, yet bound, in flagrante delicto, withering, without joy…

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(Freebie: the 2003 film, Girl with a Pearl Earring, is a slam dunk clone of Tracy Chevalier’s book. Colin Firth (Vermeer) and Scarlett Johansson (Griet) stepped off the pages of the book, onto the movie set. They make you wish the ending could be different.)

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.

Book review: The Bridges of Madison County

If you’re looking for

highly stoked eroticism

and high-rolling lives

that throw off sparks when they touch,

look elsewhere.

by Robert Waller

click here

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Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,

and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)

and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”

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