Citizens were becoming very civilized with a growing interest in music and a need for art hanging in their homes. Comely women are tulips their skirts are petals, swinging around the pollen-dusted stigmas of their legs.”Īmsterdam in the 1630s was considered one of the richest cities in the world.
(Apr.”Everything he sees speaks tulip to him. This is popular fiction created at a high pitch of craft and rapid readability. The Amsterdam of the period is brought almost physically alive, and a wistful postlude looks back at all the romantic anguish from a serene distance.
Moggach puts all this together in a series of brief, breathless chapters-packing in skillfully presented facts, atmosphere and color-each told from a different point of view: even the hapless drunk who brings the whole scheme crashing down around Jan's and Sophia's ears is given his moment in the limelight, and the figure of the elderly, cuckolded lover is for once sympathetically drawn. Out of these circumstances, the infatuated couple formulate a plot, but one that depends on getting together a great deal of money in a short time hence, the frenzied speculation in the value of new and rare breeds of tulip that gives the book its title. Sophia and the artist fall hopelessly in love the Sandvoorts' servant, Maria, is having a child by a man who, thinking himself betrayed by her, has run off and joined the navy meanwhile, Cornelius has always longed for a child.
Van Loos comes to paint Sophia, the pretty young wife of wealthy burger Cornelius Sandvoort, which starts a train of events that will irredeemably change all their lives. But whereas such books as Susan Vreeland's Girl in Hyacinth Blue and Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring concentrate on an artist's work, this is a headlong romantic drama that uses the painting of a portrait simply as a jumping-off point. It is yet another story set in 17th-century Holland involving a real-life artist, Jan van Loos. Although Moggach, a well-known TV writer and prolific novelist in her native Britain, has published here before, this book, a bestseller at home last year, is the one that is likely to be her breakout on this side of the water.
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