ShortBookandScribes #BookReview – Woman in Blue by Douglas Bruton

Woman in Blue by Douglas Bruton will be published tomorrow by Fairlight Books. My thanks to the publishers for the review copy.

‘You will live beyond one lifetime and beyond even two in the painting he makes of you.’

In the Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam, there is a painting called Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. Each day a man visits to gaze at it. He is irresistibly drawn to it. Obsessed by it. He studies the painting, in search of resolutions to his past and present loves, and the Woman in Blue studies him back. For there is more to the Woman in Blue than any of the men who gaze upon her realise. She has a story of her own to tell.

With a delicate balance of truth and fiction, past and present, Bruton masterfully explores the intersection between art, artist and viewer, arriving at a profound meditation on love and creation.

Woman in Blue is a short book which packs much between its pages. Its structure is quite unusual but effective.

Woman in Blue Reading a Letter is a beautiful and enigmatic painting by Vermeer. In alternating chapters we hear from the woman in the painting, both from within the painting and by looking back at her time as the artist’s model, offering a fictional insight into Vermeer’s processes and motivation. The other strand is from the point of view of a man who goes everyday to the museum to stand before the painting. Everyday he seems to notice something new, consider something different. He can’t turn his face away from the woman and her situation, and he hides his fixation from his wife.

As I say, the concept is quite unusual but it works. It brought the subject herself to life and the whole story is vividly portrayed. The writing is involving and elegant. Personally, I preferred the chapters that detailed the creation of the painting, Vermeer’s actions, and the everyday life and thoughts of the woman. I’m not sure I wholly understood the reasons behind the behaviour of the man in the present day. As a whole I enjoyed this novella very much and found it quietly moving and beguiling.

Douglas Bruton is the author of five previous novels: The Chess Piece Magician (2009), Mrs Winchester’s Gun Club (2019), Blue Postcards (2021), With or Without Angels (2022) and Hope Never Knew Horizon (2024). Blue Postcards was longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2021. His short fiction has appeared in various publications including Northwords Now, New Writing Scotland, Aesthetica, The Fiction Desk and the Irish Literary Review, and has won competitions including Fish and the Neil Gunn Prize. He lives in the Scottish Borders.