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A young boy in New York City, Theo Decker, miraculously survives an accident that takes the life of his mother. Alone and abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by a friend's family and struggles to make sense of his new life. In the years that follow, he becomes entranced by one of the few things that reminds him of his mother; a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the art underworld.… (more)
BookshelfMonstrosity: Paintings are at the heart of these hefty novels, both of which combine the antics of a heist novel with ruminations on literature, history, and loss. Memorable characters and rich details add to the enjoyment of both books.
Quite a lot to bite off, more than 800 pages of novel. This is rich fare, though not indigestible. Here we have, Theo, a New York boy with an absent father. His mother has to take the morning of work to go to school with her son, who's not behaving. They go to her favourite place, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And there is an explosion. She dies. He steals Fabritius' tiny masterpiece, the Goldfinch. And this is the story of their time together.
A moment by moment account of his life, from his being fostered, to his move to Las Vegas to stay with his pretty hopeless father, where he meets a fellow lost soul, Boris. The Goldfinch and his increasing guilt and fear at having taken it inform his life and get him into deeper and deeper water.
This is a rich, complex, involving story. I wanted to read on, but was often scared to do so for fear of what I might learn. Only the ending disappointed. But this is a fine plot, with fine characters and fine prose. Read it ( )
I'll probably be thinking about this novel for a long time. It's at times difficult, but always arresting and beautiful to read. I was much more impressed with this one than The Little Friend which I'd read some years ago.
I think what strikes me the most about this one is how well it gets across that hard to explain thing about some pieces of art, whether it's paintings like the Goldfinch in the story, photographs, poems or novels. That thing that gets under your skin and makes you possessive about the work of someone else. The way it speaks to you, as she says, across the years. I was touched, and you can't ask for much more than that. ( )
I loved this book! I think it was a wonderful and tragic story of a boy suffering through life and experiencing love and loss and friendship and struggling without guidance from a loving, caring and capable parental figure. I laughed, I cringed at the terrible decisions, my heart broke for the characters at times and the ending was perfectly realistic. Unfortunately I do not feel the same about the movie...but the book was well worth the 700 plus pages! ( )
Good things are worth waiting for. . . a tour de force that will be among the best books of 2013.
added by 4leschats | editBookPage, Megan Fishmann(Nov 1, 2013)
It’s my happy duty to tell you that in this case, all doubts and suspicions can be laid aside. “The Goldfinch” is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind. I read it with that mixture of terror and excitement I feel watching a pitcher carry a no-hitter into the late innings. You keep waiting for the wheels to fall off, but in the case of “The Goldfinch,” they never do.
The absurd does not liberate; it binds. ALBERT CAMUS
Dedication
For Mother, For Claude
First words
While I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years.
Quotations
It seemed like the kind of room where a call girl or a stewardess would be murdered on television.
He's telling you that living things don't last—it's all temporary. Death in life. That's why they're called natures mortes. Maybe you don't see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer—there it is.
Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.
But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.
When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a flickering sun-struck instant that existed now and forever. Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch's ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature—fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.
I looked like some cult-raised kid just rescued by local law enforcement, brought blinking from some basement stocked with firearms and powdered milk.
Even in some smoky post-catastrophe Manhattan, you could imagine him swaying genially at the door in the rags of his former uniform, the Barbours up in the apartment burning old National Geographics for warmth, living off gin and tinned crabmeat.
The problem (as I'd learned, repeatedly) was that thirty-six hours in, with your body in full revolt, and the remainder of your un-opiated life stretching out bleakly ahead of you like a prison corridor, you needed some fairly compelling reason to keep moving forward into darkness, rather than falling straight back into the gorgeous feather mattress you'd so foolishly abandoned.
To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole...
I was different, but it wasn't. As the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological static just as random as the street lamps flashing past.
Who was it said that coincidence was just God's way of remaining anonymous?
...beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.
A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don't get to choose our own hearts. We can't make ourselves want what's good for us or what's good for other people. We don't get to choose the people we are.
And as much as I'd like to believe there's a truth beyond illusion, I've come to believe that there's no truth beyond illusion. Because, between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.
“You'd be surprised...what small everyday things can lift us out of despair. But nobody can do it for you. You're the one who has to watch for the open door.” (Mrs. Swanson)
When we are sad...it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the things that don't change. (Hobie)
It was the secret no one told you, the thing you had to learn for yourself: viz. that in the antiques trade there was really no such thing as a “correct” price. Objective value—list value—was meaningless. If a customer came in clueless with money in hand (as most of them did) it didn't matter what the books said, what the experts said, what similar items at Christie's had recently gone for. An object—any object was worth whatever you could get somebody to pay for it. (Theo)
“Oh, Theo! Isn't he adorable? Kitsey unexpectantly thrusting a friend's newborn at me—me in all sincere horror leaping back as if from a lighted match.
What you want to live and be happy in this world is a woman who has her own life and lets you have yours.(Boris)
“Well—I have to say I personally have never drawn such a sharp line between ‘good' and ‘bad' as you. For me: that line is often false. The two are never disconnected. One can't exist without the other. As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how. But you—wrapped up in judgment, always regretting the past, cursing yourself, blaming yourself, asking ‘what if,' ‘what if.' ‘Life is cruel.' ‘I wish I had died instead of.' Well—think about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no—hang on—this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can't get there any other way?”
“the world is much stranger than we know or can say. And I know how you think, or how you like to think, but maybe this is one instance where you can't boil down to pure ‘good' or pure ‘bad' like you always want to do—? Like, your two different piles? Bad over here, good over here? Maybe not quite so simple. Because—all the way driving here, driving all night, Christmas lights on the motorway and I'm not ashamed to tell you, I got choked up—because I was thinking, couldn't help it, about the Bible story—? you know, where the steward steals the widow's mite, but then the steward flees to far country and invests the mite wisely and brings back thousandfold cash to widow he stole from? And with joy she forgave him, and they killed the fatted calf, and made merry?” “I think that's maybe not all the same story.”
My eyes darted nervously around the living room. My mother's book ("Jane and Prudence", Barbara Pym) face-down on the back of the sofa.
The social workers ... took clipboards and pens from their briefcases ... Enrique signed his name with a flourish. "Can't promise anything," he said, clicking his pen and sticking it back in his pocket.
I lay awake in Welty's old room, his old reading glasses and fountain pens still in the desk drawers.
Last words
And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.
A young boy in New York City, Theo Decker, miraculously survives an accident that takes the life of his mother. Alone and abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by a friend's family and struggles to make sense of his new life. In the years that follow, he becomes entranced by one of the few things that reminds him of his mother; a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the art underworld.
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Qui est Theo ? Que lui est il arrivé à New York pour qu'il soit quatorze ans plus tard , cloîtré dans une chambre d'hôtel à Amsterdam comme une bête traquée ? D'où vient cette toile de maître , Le Chardonneret , qu'il transporte partout avec lui ?
Ce roman laisse le lecteur essouflé , éblouï et encore une fois conquis par le talent hors du commun de Donna TARTT.
Haiku summary
Liked a goldfinch chained / Booze, drugs can't erase the pain / Of his mother's death (LynnB)
Blast kills mother. Painting of a goldfinch dominates life's remainder. (Bebedee)
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The Goldfinch SPOILERS ALLOWED
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