Susan Vreeland: Difference between revisions
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* ''Luncheon of the Boating Party'' New York: Viking 2007 ISBN 9780143113522 |
* ''Luncheon of the Boating Party'' New York: Viking 2007 ISBN 9780143113522 |
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* ''Clara and Mr. Tiffany'' New York: Random House 2011 ISBN 9781400068166 |
* ''Clara and Mr. Tiffany'' New York: Random House 2011 ISBN 9781400068166 |
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|url=http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/luncheon-of-the-boating-party-susan-vreeland/1008213052 |
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|month = September |
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|day = 2 |
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|year = 2011 |
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|time = 20:55 |
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|timestamp = 20110902205559}} |
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Born—N/A |
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• Education—San Diego State University |
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• Awards—Inkwell Grand Prize, Fiction, 1999; San Diego Book |
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Awards' Theodore Geisel Award; Best Novel of the Year, 2002; |
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Women's National Book Assn. First Place-Short Fiction; New |
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Voices First Place-Short Fiction |
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• Currently—lives in San Diego, California, USA |
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Susan Vreeland's short fiction has appeared in journals such as the New England Review, the Missouri Review, Confrontation, Calyx, Manoa, and Alaska Quarterly Review. Her first novel, What Love Sees, was broadcast as a CBS Sunday night movie in 1996. |
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Ms. Vreeland is the recipient of several awards, including a Women's National Book Association First Place Award in Short Fiction (1991) and a First Place in Short Fiction from New Voices (1993). Inkwell magazine for her short story, "Gifts". She teaches English literature, creative writing, and art in San Diego public schools, where she has taught since 1969. |
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More |
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"When I was nine, my great-grandfather, a landscape painter, taught me to mix colors," Susan Vreeland recalls in an interview on her publisher's web site. "With his strong hand surrounding my small one, he guided the brush until a calla lily appeared as if by magic on a page of textured watercolor paper. How many girls throughout history would have longed to be taught that, but had to do washing and mending instead?" |
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As a grown woman, Vreeland found her own magical way of translating her vision of the world into art. While teaching high school English in the 1980s, she began to write, publishing magazine articles, short stories, and her first novel, What Love Sees. In 1996, Vreeland was diagnosed with lymphoma, which forced her to take time off from teaching — time she spent undergoing medical treatment and writing stories about a fictional Vermeer painting. |
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"Creative endeavor can aid healing because it lifts us out of self-absorption and gives us a goal," she later wrote. In Vreeland's case, her goal "was to live long enough to finish this set of stories that reflected my sensibilities, so that my writing group of twelve dear friends might be given these and know that in my last months I was happy — because I was creating." |
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Vreeland recovered from her illness and wove her stories into a novel, Girl in Hyacinth Blue. The book was a national bestseller, praised by the New York Times as "intelligent, searching and unusual" and by Kirkus Reviews as "extraordinarily skilled historical fiction: deft, perceptive, full of learning, deeply moving." Its interrelated stories move backward in time, creating what Marion Lignana Rosenberg in Salon called "a kind of Chinese box unfolding from the contemporary hiding-place of a painting attributed to Vermeer all the way back to the moment the work was conceived." |
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Vreeland's next novel, The Passion of Artemisia, was based on the life of the 17th-century painter Artemisia Gentileschi, often regarded as the first woman to hold a significant place in the history of European art. "Forthright and imaginative, Vreeland's deft recreation ably showcases art and life," noted Publishers Weekly. |
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Love for the visual arts, especially painting, continues to fire Vreeland's literary imagination. The Forest Lover, published in 2004, is a fictional exploration of the life of the 20th-century Canadian artist Emily Carr. She has also written a series of art-related short stories. For Vreeland, art provides inspiration for living as well as for literature. As she put it in an autobiographical essay, "I hope that by writing art-related fiction, I might bring readers who may not recognize the enriching and uplifting power of art to the realization that it can serve them as it has so richly served me." |
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Extras |
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Two other novels relating to Vermeer were published within a year of Girl in Hyacinth Blue: The Music Lesson by Katharine Weber and Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier. |
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Vreeland lives in San Diego with her husband, a software engineer. She taught high school English and ceramics for 30 years before retiring to become a full-time writer. (From Barnes & Noble.) |
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Book Reviews |
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Vreeland's novel possesses the strength of its subject. Each of the eight chapters focuses on a small painting by Johannes Vermeer, the 17th-century Dutch master, who produced quiet paintings with exquisite color and subtlety... "In the end," the narrator notes, "it's only the moments that we have." But what exquisite moments they are in this thoughtful book. |
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Ron Charles - The Christian Science Monitor |
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The eight interlinked stories in this impressive debut collection revolve around a single painting by Vermeer; as one might expect, they contain insightful observations about the worth and the truth of art. Vreeland's skill goes deeper still; these poised and atmospheric tales present a rich variety of characters whose voices convey distinctive personalities, and each offers glimpses of Holland during different historical eras. The chronology is reversed: the first story occurs in the present day, and succeeding narratives go back in time to the 17th century. Set in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation, the moving "A Night Different from All Other Nights" portrays the Jewish family from whom the painting will be stolen after they have been sent to a concentration camp, and re-poses the question (also asked in the opening story) of how killers can revere beauty. Two narratives that treat the same event—the birth of a baby and a turning point in a marriage—take place in neighboring hamlets near Groningen during the St. Nicholas flood of 1717. Each fills in details the other does not have, and each provides indelible images of brutally hard life in a waterlogged land. In the penultimate "Still Life," set in 17th-century Delft, a poverty-hounded Vermeer begins the portrait of his daughter Magalena. "Magdalena Looking," which closes the book, reflects the evanescence of the moments that paintings capture. Unobtrusively, Vreeland builds a picture of the Dutch character, equal parts sober work ethic and faith in a harsh religion. Against these national characteristics she juxtaposes the universal human capacity for love—romantic, familial, parental—and a kind of obsessive love, the quest for beauty that distinguishes otherwise ordinary lives. The historical details that ground each narrative in time and place are obliquely revealed. In the same way, the Vermeer masterpiece achieves fuller dimension in each tale as small details of color, brush stroke, lighting, background, serve to create the picture in the reader's eye. Only the opening story disappoints; it seems staged rather than psychologically compelling. The remaining entries are elegantly executed; the characters have the solidity and the elusive mystery of Vermeer's subjects. There is suspense, as well; one wants to read these tales at one sitting, to discover how the Vermeer influenced everyone who possessed it. Vreeland paints her canvas with the sure strokes of a talented artist. |
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Publishers Weekly |
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"Pearls were a favorite item of Vermeer," observes Cornelius Engelbrecht, the secretive and obsessive professor whose conviction that he owns an authentic Vermeer launches Vreeland's lovely first novel. The painting, we soon discover, was taken from its proper (Jewish) owner by Engelbrecht's father, a German soldier during World War II—a fact that Engelbrecht struggles mightily to suppress. The one colleague to whom he shows the painting guesses the truth and derisively recommends that he burn it—"one good burning deserves another"—but we don't learn the fate of the painting. Instead, Vreeland constructs a series of vignettes, not necessarily chronological, that takes us from the rooftops of Amsterdam Jews forced to kill the pigeons they are no longer allowed to keep, to a Dutch merchant whose possession of the painting briefly complicates his marriage, to the boudoir of a French counsel's bored wife and the second story of a farmhouse in flooded Holland, and finally to the home of Vermeer himself, where art does battle with domestic necessity. Though the connections among the vignettes could be made clearer, and the ending feels abrupt—how did that painting get from the artist to the weary professor, and what finally happens to it?—each vignette has the stillness, the polish, and the balanced perfection of a Vermeer. Not quite perfect, but definitely a pearl. —Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal |
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Library Journal |
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Vreeland's wonderful second outing (What Love Sees, 1996, not seen) is a novel made of stories, each delving farther into the provenance of a Vermeer painting, and each capturing a moment of life, much as the great painter did himself. The only wobble in this elegant little book is at the start, where a stiffness in character may be intended but jars even so: a high-school math teacher confides to a colleague that he owns (and adores) a painting—of a girl sewing at a window—that he knows is a Vermeer. All the evidence—of technique, color, subject—is there, yet the painting lacks documentation to validate its authenticity: nor will the math teacher, one Cornelius Engelbrecht, tell just how it became his. The reader is more privileged, though, and learns quickly enough that Engelbrecht's Nazi father stole it in 1940 from a doomed Jewish family in Amsterdam. Such reader-privilege becomes an overwhelming emotional test when Vreeland goes back to visit that family, in that year, just before the theft ("A Night Different From All Other Nights"). Farther back still, a happily married Dutch couple owns the painting—and when the husband admits that the girl in it reminds him of an earlier lover, the marriage is briefly shaken ("Adagia"). Set when Beethoven's Eroica symphony is "new," "Hyacinth Blues" offers a biting bit of social satire—and lets the reader discover just how the painting's papers did in fact get lost. Still deeper back goes Vreeland, taking up with masterful insight, feeling, and control the life of a small Dutch farm family caught in the great flood of 1717; of a young engineer who loves, loses (pathetically), and hands on the painting; of Vermeer himself as he paints the picture, struggling against debt, father of 11; and, in a wondrous, bittersweet epiphany, of the daughter herself whom Vermeer chose as his model. Extraordinarily skilled historical fiction: deft, perceptive, full of learning, deeply moving. |
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Kirkus Reviews |
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== Awards == |
== Awards == |
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== References == |
== References == |
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Revision as of 19:20, 10 September 2011
Susan Vreeland is an American authoress. Several of her books deal with the relationship between art and fiction.[1] The Passion of Artemisia is a fictionalised investigation of some aspects of the life of Artemisia Gentileschi.[2]
Works
The works of Susan Vreeland include:[3]
- What love sees: a biographical novel New York: PaperJacks 1988 ISBN 9780770108847
- What English teachers want: a survival guide Unionville, NY: Royal Fireworks Press 1995 ISBN 9780880922241
- Girl in Hyacinth Blue Denver: MacMurray & Beck 1999 ISBN 9781878448903
- The Passion of Artemisia New York: Viking 2002 ISBN 9780670894499
- The Forest Lover New York: Viking 2004 ISBN 9780670032679
- Life Studies New York: Viking 2005 ISBN 9780670031771
- Luncheon of the Boating Party New York: Viking 2007 ISBN 9780143113522
- Clara and Mr. Tiffany New York: Random House 2011 ISBN 9781400068166
Awards
References
External links
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