Review - Girl in Hyacinth Blue

Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland

rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book traces the ownership of an undiscovered Vermeer painting back through a few centuries, beginning with the most recent owner, Cornelius, the son of a man who stole it from a Jewish household while working for the nazis. Cornelius is convinced that the painting is a Vermeer, although he has no proof of its origins.

I had trouble getting into the book at first because I didn't like Cornelius--he was kind of creepy. There were also a couple of paragraphs in the first two stories that confused me as to which character was speaking, so it could have stood more editing, although from what I understand the stories were all written at different times. It was only when the author had four of them that she realized she wanted to fill in the painting's story even more and make it into a novel. She chose to write it in reverse-chronological format to preserve the mystery of whether the painting is actually a Vermeer.

Despite the clunkiness in the beginning, I really enjoyed the novel. I liked most of the stories about the painting's owners, especially "Adagia," in which a man who bought the painting as a memento of a lost love learns to focus on the present and gains forgiveness from his wife, the cycle of two stories about a man who has to give up his illegitimate son and the woman he gives him to ("Morningshine" and "From the Personal Papers of Adriaan Kuypers"), and "Magdalena Looking," in which we learn about the girl in the painting who has inspired so many over the centuries.

This book didn't tug at my heart as much as some (although "Adagia" made me tear up a bit), but the most important thing that I got out of it was that work isn't everything--we need some beauty in life too. Everyone who owned the painting had a special connection to it. Art brought something to their lives. The affirmation that art is important brought something to my own life as a writer, and I appreciated the author's statements in the interview at the back that even if we feel like something has been written/drawn/painted before, anything that causes us to slow down, reflect and appreciate God's world and share that beauty with others is worth doing and worth the time we sacrifice to accomplish it.

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