The Silent Hours
Publisher
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Autrement
Parution date
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EAN
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9782746715011
Number of pages
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134
Description
Emanuel de Witte’s seventeenth-century painting Interior with a Woman at the Virginal shows the back of a woman, playing a virginal, her face reflected in a mirror. She is in a bedchamber, but through the door can be seen more of the house and those who live in it. The cozy-seeming, detail-filled Renaissance interior serves as the inspiration for Gaëlle Josse’s stunning first novel.
In Delft, in 1667, Magdalena Van Beyeren chose to have her portrait painted from behind as she sits at her harpsichord. The subject of the portrait, however, is seen more in the details of the setting than in the sitter. The Silent Hours, a fictional diary, begins with Magdalena’s description of her surroundings in the portrait. Her life, from her happiest memories to her darkest secrets, is disclosed through the details of the painting.
When Magdalena was a little girl, her father, a partner in the Dutch East India Company, let her explore the recesses of the ships whose cargo he traded. She became so knowledgeable that in time he made her his assistant.
But all freedom and responsibility ended when Magdalena fell in love with and married Pieter Van Beyeren. Her talent for business was immediately redirected toward hearth and home, where she raised five children and tended to domestic affairs. She writes in her diary of things she never otherwise revealed, including witnessing a murder when she was a child and her guilt that she did not step forward to save the wrong person from being condemned for the crime. She describes her worries for her children, in particular her two oldest daughters who are of marrying age. To her diary she confesses her longings and disappointments, including her abandonment by her husband after the birth of their latest stillborn child. The portrait of the woman in the diary shows what the painting could never portray: It is an intriguing look at a seventeenth-century woman, a bleak view of her marriage, motherhood, and domestic life.
In exquisite prose, Josse fully reveals the woman who thought to be seen only from behind. Tracing Magdalena’s journey from an intrepid child to a resigned, almost extinguished adult, describing the arc of the days of the time, Josse paints a vivid portrait of a woman trapped in her destiny.
Author
Gaëlle Josse : Gaëlle Josse is a poet and photographer. This is her first novel.
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