Life Studies: Stories - Hardcover

Vreeland, Susan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670031771 ISBN 13: 9780670031771

Publisher: Viking Adult, 2004

Synopsis

A collection of short stories explores art through the eyes of everyday contemporary people or the lovers, servants, children, and neighbors who surrounded great Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masters, in a volume that includes the stories of a disillusioned banker whose understanding of his daughter is furthered by Renoir, a wife's journey of self-discovery as a nude model, and more.

About this title

About the Author

Susan VreelandÂ’s is the bestselling author of Girl in Hyacinth Blue, The Passion of Artemisis, and The Forest Lover. Her short fiction has appeared in journals such as the Missouri Review, New England Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and Tri-Quarterly.

Reviews

Vreeland, whose Girl in Hyacinth Blue (1999) fictionalized the story behind a Vermeer painting, again blends fact and fiction to bring artists and the lives of those affected by them to life. She approaches her subjects, from Renoir to a young girl coming to terms with death, with emotional sensitivity and great humanity, revealing how they, too, survive daily life. With a wonderful eye for detail and thorough research, she recreates the Impressionist and post-Impressionist worlds. A few minor quibbles: the first set of stories threatens to veer into romance novel melodrama, and the high moral value placed on art creates perhaps unrealistically optimistic messages. Vreeland hopes to show the redeeming power of art in this beautiful collection, and she does.

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Having carved out a niche as an insightful and sensitive chronicler of artists' lives, Vreeland (Girl in Hyacinth Blue) continues to consider the artistic impulse with fresh and imaginative fictional portraits. The first eight stories in this collection are based on biographical incidents in the lives of such artists as Renoir, Van Gogh and Cézanne, though the painters themselves are not the protagonists but figures to the side, as it were, in the lives of other people. A wet nurse who cares for Berthe Morisot's baby daughter gradually becomes aware of the liaison between Morisot and her brother-in-law, Édouard Manet. At Giverny, Monet's gardener watches in anguish as the artist burns his water lily paintings. Vreeland herself has a painterly eye that conveys vivid sensory impressions of rural landscapes, city street scenes and domestic interiors. The remaining 10 stories revolve around ordinary people who are profoundly influenced by exposure to artistic creation. Notable is the semiautobiographical "Crayon, 1955," in which a young girl of humble background is introduced to pre-Columbian figures and Picasso's paintings, which enable her to accept the death of the grandfather who encouraged her to see the beauty in differences. While some stories stretch the theme too far, the best of them have a luminous clarity that does justice to the author's intentions.
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Artists' lives serve as the inspiration for Vreeland's popular fiction, most recently in The Forest Lover (2003), a novel about Canadian painter Emily Carr. Writing beautifully accessible prose, Vreeland illuminates the conflicting demands of art and life in spite of a tendency to overly romanticize her subjects. Although she doesn't altogether avoid that pitfall in this irresistible collection of short stories, she does succeed in reaching deeper dimensions. To dramatize the cruel and sexist social mores of their time, Vreeland takes considerable liberties with the life stories of Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, and Edouard Manet, then achieves more subtle effects in tender stories about a boy caught taunting Cezanne and the son of the postman of Arles whose sessions sitting for Van Gogh usher in his coming-of-age. Freed from the complications of portraying iconic figures in her contemporary tales, Vreeland creates unexpected moments of magic, such as when a woman in a floundering marriage poses nude for a sculpture class and gains a new perspective on both herself and her burdened husband. Entertaining and provocative, Vreeland raises piquant questions about relationships between men and women and about how art can both drive people apart and bring people together. Donna Seaman
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Edition details

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0670031771
• ISBN 13: 9780670031771
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304