From Library Journal
Cornelis Sandvoort is a successful merchant in 1630s Amsterdam. Widowed, he marries the much younger Sophia, the eldest daughter of a family that has been left impoverished by the death of the father. They have a somewhat happy life shared with their servant Maria. However, this joy is turned upside down when Cornelis decides to have their portrait painted by Jan van Loos, who brings unexpected passion to Sophia, whose actions impact all their lives. Though Moggach provides wonderful descriptions of Amsterdam, the book plods along to an anticipated ending that is somewhat disappointing. Listeners will get bogged down in the tedious conversations and meandering subplots, narrated by Rula Lenska, that add little to the story. Some editing might have made this better and more gripping. Those with a love of regency and other kinds of historical romances may enjoy this. Otherwise, not a necessary purchase.ADanna Bell-Russel, Library of Congress
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Young Sophia willingly married elderly Cornelius Sandvoort, a wealthy merchant, to escape poverty and help her family. She realizes that she has a good life with an honorable man but everything changes when her husband decides to have their portrait painted as is the custom for well-to-do families in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Jan van Loos, a talented, penniless painter, awakens Sophia's desires, and she succumbs, too, to the two Dutch passions for art and tulips. In order to flee Amsterdam together, the lovers need money, so they decide to gamble their limited resources on the latest craze of tulip speculation: if they buy the right bulb they can make a sizable fortune. But as their scheme gets closer to fruition, things begin to unravel. Moggach's lush and sensuously written novel will appeal to romantics as well as fans of historical novels, and the film rights have been sold to Steven Spielberg. Patty Engelmann
From Kirkus Reviews
A pallid account of adultery and deception somewhat enrichedbut not muchby its 17th-century Dutch setting. Young Sophia has saved herself and her family by marrying wealthy, amiable Cornelis Sandvoort, 40 years her senior. After three years of marriage, with as yet no heir, Cornelis tries for the next best route to immortality by engaging Jan van Loos to paint the couples portrait. With this one display of vanity begins the twisting plot of a moral fable that dooms all the players involved, transforming their tidy Amsterdam into a watery labyrinth of deceit. Shortly after meeting for the first sitting, Jan and Sophia begin a torrid affair. They steal through the streets in disguise and pass notes through servants, risking everything for just the briefest contact. When Sophias maid, Maria, becomes pregnant, the lovers concoct an outlandish plan they hope will buy their freedom. With a pillow tucked under her gown, Sophia pretends also to be pregnant; she plans to pawn off Marias illegitimate baby as her own, to die in childbirth, then run off with Jan. The novels title suggests the historical phenomenon that may aid the illicit pair. Gripped in tulip fever, the Amsterdam of 1636 uses bulbs as a trading commodity, their value based on rareness of color and singularity of bloom. The flowers can make or break futures in an afternoon, and its on this chaotic fluctuation that Jan and Sophia depend to make their fortune. Immersed in the language of flowers and the imagery of Dutch still lifes, the storys best moments mimic the stilled perfection of painting. But at the same time, more often than not, Moggachs reserved, objectified tone distances the reader. An interesting conceit with little emotional impact, making for a tale more reserved and two-dimensional than burgeoning with its lives.-- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
“Sumptuous prose . . . reads like a thriller.”—The New York Times Book Review
“An artful novel in every sense of the word . . . deftly evokes seventeenth-century Amsterdam’s vibrant atmosphere.”—Los Angeles Times
“Need a brief escape into a beautiful and faraway world? Deborah Moggach’s wonderful Tulip Fever can offer you that.”—New York Post
“Taut with suspense and unexpected revelations.”—Entertainment Weekly
“Elegantly absorbing.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
From the Inside Flap
A tale of art, beauty, lust, greed, deception and retribution -- set in a refined society ablaze with tulip fever.
In 1630s Amsterdam, tulipomania has seized the populace. Everywhere men are seduced by the fantastic exotic flower. But for wealthy merchant Cornelis Sandvoort, it is his young and beautiful wife, Sophia, who stirs his soul. She is the prize he desires, the woman he hopes will bring him the joy that not even his considerable fortune can buy.
Cornelis yearns for an heir, but so far he and Sophia have failed to produce one. In a bid for immortality, he commissions a portrait of them both by the talented young painter Jan van Loos. But as Van Loos begins to capture Sophia's likeness on canvas, a slow passion begins to burn between the beautiful young wife and the talented artist.
As the portrait unfolds, so a slow dance is begun among the household's inhabitants. Ambitions, desires, and dreams breed a grand deception -- and as the lies multiply, events move toward a thrilling and tragic climax.
In this richly imagined international bestseller, Deborah Moggach has created the rarest of novels -- a lush, lyrical work of fiction that is also compulsively readable. Seldom has a novel so vividly evoked a time, a place, and a passion.
From the Back Cover
A tale of art, beauty, lust, greed, deception and retribution -- set in a refined society ablaze with tulip fever.
In 1630s Amsterdam, tulipomania has seized the populace. Everywhere men are seduced by the fantastic exotic flower. But for wealthy merchant Cornelis Sandvoort, it is his young and beautiful wife, Sophia, who stirs his soul. She is the prize he desires, the woman he hopes will bring him the joy that not even his considerable fortune can buy.
Cornelis yearns for an heir, but so far he and Sophia have failed to produce one. In a bid for immortality, he commissions a portrait of them both by the talented young painter Jan van Loos. But as Van Loos begins to capture Sophia's likeness on canvas, a slow passion begins to burn between the beautiful young wife and the talented artist.
As the portrait unfolds, so a slow dance is begun among the household's inhabitants. Ambitions, desires, and dreams breed a grand deception -- and as the lies multiply, events move toward a thrilling and tragic climax.
In this richly imagined international bestseller, Deborah Moggach has created the rarest of novels -- a lush, lyrical work of fiction that is also compulsively readable. Seldom has a novel so vividly evoked a time, a place, and a passion.
About the Author
Deborah Moggach OBE FRSL is an English novelist and screenwriter. She has written eighteen novels, including The Ex-Wives, Tulip Fever, These Foolish Things and Heartbreak Hotel.
Rula Lenska is an English-Polish actress. She mainly appears in British stage and television productions, but is known in the United States for a series of commercials for Alberto VO5 hairspray in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Her first husband was actor Brian Deacon and her second husband was actor Dennis Waterman.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Sophia
Trust not to appearances.
-- Jacob Cats, Moral Emblems, 1632
We are eating dinner, my husband and I. A shred of leek is caught in his beard. I watch it move up and down as he chews; it is like an insect caught in the grass. I watch it idly, for I am a young woman and live simply, in the present. I have not yet died and been reborn. I have not yet died a second time -- for in the eyes of the world this will be considered a second death. In my end is my beginning; the eel curls round and swallows its own tail. And in the beginning I am still alive, and young, though my husband is old. We lift our wine flutes and drink. Words are etched on my glass: Mankind's hopes are fragile glass and life is therefore also short, a scratched homily through the sinking liquid.
Cornelis tears off a piece of bread and dips it into his soup. He chews for a moment. "My dear, I have something to discuss." He wipes his lips with his napkin. "In this transitory life do we not all crave immortality?"
I freeze, knowing what is coming. I gaze at my roll, lying on the tablecloth. It has split, during baking, and parted like lips. For three years we have been married and I have not produced a child. This is not through lack of trying. My husband is still a vigorous man in this respect. At night he mounts me; he spreads my legs and I lie there like an upturned beetle pressed down by a shoe. With all his heart he longs for a son -- an heir to skip across these marble floors and give a future to this large, echoing house on the Herengracht.
So far I have failed him. I submit to his embraces, of course, for I am a dutiful wife and shall always be grateful to him. The world is treacherous and he reclaimed me, as we reclaimed our country from the sea, draining her and ringing her with dykes to keep her safe, to keep her from going under. I love him for this.
And then he surprises me. "To this effect I have engaged the services of a painter. His name is Jan van Loos and he is one of the most promising artists in Amsterdam -- still lifes, landscapes, but most especially portraiture. He comes on the recommendation of Hendrick Uylenburgh, who as you know is a discerning dealer?Rembrandt van Rijn, newly arrived from Leiden, is one of his proteges."
My husband lectures me like this. He tells me more than I want to know but tonight his words land noiselessly around me. Our portrait is going to be painted! "He is thirty-six, the same age as our brave new century." Cornelis drains his glass and pours another. He is drunk with the vision of ourselves, immortalized on canvas. Drinking beer sends him to sleep, but drinking wine makes him patriotic. "Ourselves, living in the greatest city, home to the greatest nation on the globe." It is only me sitting opposite him but he addresses a larger audience. Above his yellowed beard his cheeks are flushed. "For doesn't Vondel describe Amsterdam thus? What waters are not shadowed by her sails? On which mart does she not sell her wares? What peoples does she not see lit by the moon, she who herself sets the laws of the whole ocean?"
He does not expect an answer for I am just a young wife, with little life beyond these walls. Around my waist hang keys to nothing but our linen chests, for I have yet to unlock anything of more significance. In fact, I am wondering what clothes I shall wear for my portrait. That is the size of my world so far. Forget oceans and empires.
Maria brings in a plate of herrings and retreats, sniffing. Fog rolls in off the sea and she has been coughing all day. This hasn't dampened her spirits. I am sure she has a secret lover; she hums in the kitchen and sometimes I catch her standing in front of a mirror rearranging her hair under her cap. I shall find out. We are confidantes, or as much confidantes as our circumstances allow. Since I left my sisters she is the only one I have.
Next week the painter will arrive. My husband is a connoisseur of paintings; our house is filled with them. Behind him, on the wall, hangs a canvas of Susannah and the Elders. The old men peer at the naked girl as she bathes. By daylight I can see their greedy faces, but now, in the candlelight, they have retreated back into the shadows; all I can see is her plump, pale flesh above my husband's head. He lifts a fish onto his plate. He is a collector of beautiful things.
I see us as a painting. Cornelis, his white lace collar against black, his beard moving as he eats. The herring lying on my plate, its glistening, scored skin split open to reveal the flesh within; the parted lips of my roll. Grapes, plump and opaque in the candlelight; the pewter goblet glowing dully.
I see us there, sitting at our dining table, motionless -- our own frozen moment before everything changes.
After dinner he reads to me from the Bible. "All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field; the grass withereth, the flower fadeth, because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it; surely the people is grass..."
But I am already hanging on the wall, watching us.
Sophia's elderly husband decides to have the couple's portrait painted, and when Sophia meets artist Jan Van Loos, she struggles against her attraction to him--but their love affair has the inevitability of a train wreck. When Sophia and Jan decide they need to escape and build a new life for themselves, they stake all and join in the tulip speculation. The listener hopes they'll succeed against all odds and is drawn into the frenzied world of Amsterdam during the height of tulip mania, when a bulb was worth a fortune. Skillfully narrated by Rula Lenska, the story's pacing makes it hard to stop listening--even when it's clear some-thing terrible is going to happen. Characters' voices are well differentiated and believable, although the Dutch accents are sometimes off. J.D.P. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
