I always said that I found some of the finest writings, some of those which became an intrinsic part of my soul, by coincidence. Or, are there really such things as coincidences?
I found "Girl in Hyacinth Blue" by Susan Vreeland while I was looking for another book in the Regent's College library. The word "Hyacinth"caught my eye, because you rarely find it in a book title and, most of all, because Hyacinths are my favorite flowers in the whole world. I took the book and read the first page, then the first ten...and by the tenth page I was too caught into the storyline to be able to put it back on the shelf again. I took it with me and it has revealed itself to me as one of the loveliest writings I've encountered lately.
The story of an imaginary painting by Vermeer (this also caught my attention, as Vermeer is my favorite painter) and the way it travels from different generations, different places in the world, the way it seems to catch a life of its own, a life that is intertwined with the one of the people who own it. From a compromised French noblewoman, to a former Nazi, a hanged girl, a poor Dutch family and, in the end, to Vermeer's own daughter, Magdalena. A beautiful writing style that makes you feel part of the story, not merely a reader.
I would recommend this book to anyone who is yearning for a lovely and vivid writing about the way beauty can reach different people in different ways, mean distinct things and mark the lives of people in unique ways. A great book!
Some of my favorite quotes:
< Standing up as if to go, the muslin in my hand, I couldn't keep my eyes from the girl in the painting. What I saw before as vacancy on her face seemed now an irretrievable innocence and deep calm that caused me a pang. It wasn't just a feature of her youth, but of something fine - an artless nature. I could see it in her eyes. This girl, when she became a woman, WOULD risk all, sacrifice all, overlook and endure all in order to be one with her beloved.
"This is more than a pretty curio, my good man", I said "You are looking into the guiltless soul of maidenhood"
There was, I realized then, something indecent about behaving as we had in front of her. The shock to her sensibilities would leave indelible marks.
When my trunks were loaded and I was helped into the coach, what I felt was not a weeping, but a longing to weep that I mastered all to easily. Gerard would survive, and thrive. 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 paintings or of children or of love, ought to be a source of truer tears than an I could muster at parting.
Love as I knew it was foolish anyway, all that business about blood boiling and hearts palpitating, all that noticing of eyeballs. Think realistically, my dear. Who wants to peer into a quivering nostril anyway? If, indeed, that was love, it wasn't enough. I came to see that knowing what love ISN'T might be just as valuable, though infinitely less satisfying, as knowing what it is. Looking out the coach window at men and women bending over flat potato fields, I determined that I would be just as content as my lost girl gazing out her own sunlit window. A great deal can be said for just sitting and thinking. Life is not, nor has been, a fantaisie, but one can still amuse oneself, no? >
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<"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. But that didn't mean that the girl didn't want anything, like Mother said about her. 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">
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<"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.
For a while he was content with her phantom being, and then later, when something between curiosity and longing stirred him, he felt foolish to intrude on a life already half lived">
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<"No, she wasn't beautiful, she owned, but there was a simplicity in her young face that she knew the years had eroded, a stilled longing in the forward lean of her body, a wishing in the intensity of her eyes. The painting showed she did not yet know that lives end abruptly, that much of living is repetition and separation, that buttons forever need sewing no matter how ferociously one works the thread, that nice things almost happen.
Still a woman overcome with wishes, she wished Nicolaes would have come with her to see her in the days of her sentry post wonder when life and hope were new and full of possibility, but he had seen no reason to close up the shop on such a whim.
She walked away slowly along a wet stone wall that shone iridescent and the wetness of the street reflected back the blue of her best dress. Water spots appeared fast, turning the cerulean to deep ultramarine, Father's favorite blue. Light rain pricked the charchoal green canal water into delicate, dark lace, and she wondered if it had ever been painted just that way, or if the life of someone as inconsequential as a water drop could be arrested and given to the world in a painting, or if the world would care.
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 few arms' lengths, looking, looking, looking, and they would never know her">
