Looking Back - Falling Angels

Looking Back... In an effort to transfer my book journal entries over to this blog, I'm going to attempt to post (in chronological order) an entry every Friday. I may or may not add extra commentary to what I jotted down in these journals.

Falling Angels by Tracy Chevalier

Fiction

2001 Penguin Group

Finished October 24, 2001

Rating: 5/5 (Outstanding)

Publisher's Blurb:

Set in London at the turn of the last century, Falling Angels is a masterful, moving, and beautifully written novel from the author The Orlando Sentinel called "as attentive to the details of daily living as Jane Austen and Edith Wharton ever were."A fashionable London cemetery, January 1901: Two graves stand side by side, one decorated with an oversize classical urn, the other with a sentimental marble angel. Two families, visiting their respective graves on the day after Queen Victoria's death, teeter on the brink of a new era. The Colemans and the Waterhouses are divided by social class as well as taste. They would certainly not have become acquainted had not their two girls, meeting behind the tombstones, become best friends. And, even more unsuitably, become involved with the gravedigger's muddy son.

As the girls grow up, as the new king changes social customs, as a new, forward-thinking era takes wing, the lives and fortunes of the two families become more and more closely intertwined -- neighbors in life as well as death.

Against a gas-lit backdrop of social and political history, Tracy Chevalier explores the prejudices and flaws of a changing time. A novel that is at once elegant, daring, original, and compelling, Falling Angels is a splendid follow-up to the book The New York Times called "marvelously evocative" and The Wall Street Journal deemed "triumphant."

My Original Thoughts (2001):

Wonderful, wonderful book! I didn't want it to end. Very unpredictable. I was shocked by two events. Loved the narrative style (each chapter narrated by a different character), similar to that of The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. Well-done! Memorable characters. 

My Current Thoughts:

I've kept a copy of this novel for decades, hoping to read it a second time. I've only read one other novel by Chevalier (Girl with a Pearl Earring), which I also greatly enjoyed. It's interesting that in my original notes, I remark on the alternating points-of-view. That style is so common now, but I must not have read very many books using it until the early 2000s. 

Looking Back - Girl with A Pearl Earring

Looking Back... In an effort to transfer my book journal entries over to this blog, I'm going to attempt to post (in chronological order) an entry every Friday. I may or may not add extra commentary to what I jotted down in these journals.

Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier

Fiction

2001 Penguin Books (first published in 1999)

Finished on July 31, 2001

Rating: 4.5/5 (Very Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

With precisely 35 canvases to his credit, the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer represents one of the great enigmas of 17th-century art. The meager facts of his biography have been gleaned from a handful of legal documents. Yet Vermeer's extraordinary paintings of domestic life, with their subtle play of light and texture, have come to define the Dutch golden age. His portrait of the anonymous Girl with a Pearl Earring has exerted a particular fascination for centuries—and it is this magnetic painting that lies at the heart of Tracy Chevalier's second novel of the same title.

Girl with a Pearl Earring centers on Vermeer's prosperous Delft household during the 1660s. When Griet, the novel's quietly perceptive heroine, is hired as a servant, turmoil follows. First, the 16-year-old narrator becomes increasingly intimate with her master. Then Vermeer employs her as his assistant—and ultimately has Griet sit for him as a model.

My Original Thoughts (2001):

Historical fiction. Very readable. Engrossing! Sexual tension. Emotionally charged. Wonderful characterization. I read it with an article full of Vermeer's paintings beside me. Very enlightening about the actual thought process of a painter and the mechanics involved in painting. Would read again.

My Current Thoughts: 

I don't know if I read it a second time, nor do I remember if I watched the movie.