read: girl with a pearl earring
Tracy Chevalier's debt to Vermeer is as plain as her simple, evocative prose in this imagined account of the artist's complicity with his subject and muse. The author's unspoken, and perhaps unintentional, debt to the writer Guy de Maupassant is equally profound, if more subtly summoned by the story's gently sustained sense of life's ironies, justices and injustices. This is a book best enjoyed, like some good paintings, in a single sitting.