The Goldfinch

Trust the hype, it's been a while since I read a 780-page book in 5 days and actually suffered pangs awakening and realizing it was over. I'd finished it after almost a week of constant company. No more [b:The Goldfinch|17333223|The Goldfinch|Donna Tartt|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1378710146s/17333223.jpg|24065147] to fall into and evade most other activities. And what will become of Theo? of Pippa? They are still in their twenties when the book ends but the story of their meeting, their sublime disastrous connection precludes a future or does it? Theo's almost hopeful final thoughts close the story as he adds his "love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them." Tartt has show more succeeded in keeping me enthralled from the events at the museum and their tragic aftermath and the glaring descriptions of Las Vegas living and youthful drug exploration on into serious addiction to the vagaries of curating and exploiting antique furniture. A 14-year-old boy is possessed by a 17th C painting of a captive goldfinch, an actual work of art by Fabritius. "if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don't think 'oh, I love this picture because it's universal.' 'I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.' That's not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It's a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you...an individual heart-shock. Your dream...yours, yours. I was painted for you." The book spoke to this reader. show less

This one gets 5 stars, and maybe that's all you need to know. If you haven't read it, go read it. If you haven't read it, you may not want to read this, as some aspects of the story of course are revealed.

Donna Tartt has accomplished the rarity of a powerful page-turner that is written on an enormous canvas, that asks, and to a larger than expected extent answers, big questions. It has readers all over the country aching to help the downtrodden main character Theo make better decisions, while they laugh helplessly at the antics of his one great friend, bad boy Boris.

It all revolves around the painting of The Goldfinch identified in the title. Reportedly the Frick Museum in New York is now attracting big crowds every day clamoring to see show more it. Although Tartt's story is made up, this beautiful painting by a contemporary of Vermeer, little known painter Carel Fabritius, is real. In the novel a bomb explosion in the museum changes high schooler Theo's life and, at the urging of a dying man, brings the painting, his mother's favorite, into his possession.

His beloved mother has died in the explosion, and his scoundrel father had previously disappeared, so only child Theo is on his own. Eventually he ends up with the wealthy Park Avenue family of his schoolmate Andy. The mother is chilly, but her charity toward Theo helps him make it through a difficult time, and she will re-enter his adult life. "Her voice, like Andy's, was hollow and infinitely far away; even when she was standing right next to you she sounded as if she were relaying transmissions from Alpha Centauri". As for his affect-less geek friend Andy, "Sometimes I wondered what it would take to break Andy out of his math-nerd turret: a tidal wave? Decepticon invasion? Godzilla tromping down Fifth Avenue? He was a planet without an atmosphere." Via a last request from the dying man in the museum, Theo comes to know antique furniture refurbisher Hobie, and Hobie's sweet ward Pippa, who is Theo's age and also a survivor of the museum explosion. Theo yearns for the relaxed, safe atmosphere provided by Hobie and his back of the store living quarters in the Village in Manhattan: "{S}ometimes I could lull myself back to sleep by thinking of his house, where without realizing it you slipped away sometimes into 1850, a world of ticking clocks and creaking floorboards, copper pots and baskets of turnips and onions in the kitchen, candle flames leaning all to the left in the draft of an opened door and tall parlor windows billowing and swagged like ball gowns, cool quiet rooms where old things slept."

Theo comes to live with Hobie, who is a disheveled and kind-hearted craftsman who brings some stability to Theo's life. Theo in turn begins to learn Hobie's trade. But then Theo's father reappears and takes him to live with his father's girlfriend in a sterile outpost of Las Vegas townhouses. There Theo meets Boris, a crooked Russian mining magnate's son with an idiosyncratic grasp of English. Like Theo, Boris has repeatedly been left to his own devices, but in Boris's short lifetime that has occurred all over the world, as he has traveled with his father. In Indonesia Boris briefly and happily converted to Islam, because the Muslims were so good to him. "{T}he mosque was brilliant. Falling down place - stars shining through at night - birds on the roof. An old Javanese man taught us the Koran. And they fed me too, and were kind, and made sure I was clean and had clean clothes. Sometimes I fell asleep on my prayer rug. And at salah, near dawn, when the birds woke up, always the sound of wings beating!" Boris has endless enthusiasm for life even as he routinely engages in self-destructive behavior. The two ingest astounding quantities of drugs while living their unsupervised lives. As they grow older, their paths will cross in unusual ways, their friendship always strong and shaping the events that follow. "{I}t occurred to me that despite his faults, which were numerous and spectacular, the reason I liked Boris and felt happy around him from almost the moment I'd met him was that he was never afraid. You didn't meet many people who moved freely through the world with such a vigorous contempt for it and at the same time such oddball and unthwartable faith in what, in childhood, he had liked to call, 'the Planet of Earth'".

The characters are all three-dimensional. Even Theo's father, one of the most reprehensible individuals ever to inhabit a book, has more than one side to him. Boris appreciates his kindness: "feeding me, talking with me, spending time, sheltering me in his roof, giving me the clothes off his back . . . you hated your father so much but in some ways he was a good man."

"I wouldn't say good."

"Well I would."

"well, you would be the only one. You would be wrong."

The painting eventually brings both Theo and Boris into danger, as they team up to retrieve it from international crooks. I'll leave it up to you to find out how that is resolved. All of this makes putting the book down nearly impossible. But at the same time Tartt manages to weave in bigger questions and issues, including about the experience of art. At one point Hobie says, "You see one painting, I see another, the art book puts it at another remove still, the lady buying the greeting card at the museum gift shop sees something else entire, and that's not even to mention the people separated from us in time - four hundred years before us, four hundred years after we're gone - it'll never strike anyone the same way and the great majority of people it'll never strike in any deep way at all but - a really great painting is fluid enough to work its way through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular. Yours, yours. I was painted for you.." And what does the beautiful Goldfinch itself have to tell us, a bird fettered by a chain but given eternal life in this painting? Tartt takes on the meaning of life (the answer is not "42", for you Douglas Adams fans), and God ("a long term pattern we can't decipher {like a} huge, slow-moving weather system rolling in on us from afar") and more. Theo experiences horrible loss, and makes headshaking mistakes, but continues on with the same unthwartable faith as Boris. “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 illuminated in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.”

He longs for romance with Pippa, but are they too closely tied by the trauma they both have experienced? When he is in that home with Hobie, in those "cool quiet rooms where old things slept", he learns what is most important in his life. But he repeatedly risks losing that haven with his risky behavior and passion for the painting. For the reader who avidly rides through all this with Theo and Boris, there is an insatiable desire to guide each of them into safer harbors. They won't have it. It is a large, profound story, and you won't forget either of them, or the others that surround them. show less

I spent months reading this book and I just can't believe it's over... I wish it had more pages now XD. But this was genuinely one of the most immersive experiences I've ever had with a book. Donna Tart's writing is impeccable. She makes sure that you get exactly what she wants you to know, be it background information about the environment or barely anything. I genuinely felt like I was living Theo's life along with him, and for that I probably will never stop thinking about this. The story is so complex yet so human, I don't understand why I haven't read this sooner. I tend to stick with fantasy and scifi books since that is what I know, but this book has single-handedly convinced me that I would love the literary fiction world show more aswell. But besides that, I will never get over Theo and his pretty little painting (to oversimplify it :p)
This may not be a book for everyone, but it was the book for me show less

Thirteen-year-old Theo survives a terrorist bombing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which kills his mother, and takes from the museum a priceless painting.

I generally like long books, but this one seemed very long. It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon, and by three-quarters of the way through, I was exhausted. Although I can’t point to anything specifically that is bloat, I couldn’t help but ask myself whether this book really needed to be this long, or if perhaps it was somewhat blown up by its self-importance.

All the things Donna Tartt does well (based on her very short body of work–three novels in total), she does well in The Goldfinch. She is terrific at conveying details that make people and places seem vivid and real. show more The scene where Theo leaves the suddenly transformed museum after the explosion was at the same time dreamlike and yet absolutely realistic, a breath-stopping piece of writing. Her knack for details bring her characters to life without making them mundane. And she has a peculiar gift for writing about that disconnected state of mind that occurs when you’re inebriated or high or traumatized. (I still recall a scene in her first novel, The Secret History, where the protagonist was so drunk, and his drunkenness described so precisely, that I felt drunk myself just from reading it.) In The Goldfinch, Theo relies on pills, moving through his own life in a detached, observant mode so that he’s like nothing but a head bobbing above everything he sees, and thus able to describe it all so precisely.

And yet. Perhaps it is the story itself that cannot support all of this rich detail. (Here is where I must descend into spoiler territory, so beware.)

Theo is haunted by the painting he has taken, The Goldfinch. He is terrified that he will be caught with it, that he will be imprisoned and fined and held up to censure for what he has done. For a boy, this is a reasonable fear, but I grew impatient with the adult Theo continuing to have it. Surely it might have occurred to him that the museum wanted the painting back no matter what, and that no one would consider a 13-year-old to be an opportunistic art thief. What annoyed me most about this is that Tartt gave herself a perfectly reasonable out. When Theo runs away from Las Vegas in the middle of the night, he thinks he is carrying the painting, but he never checks. Instead of being persecuted by his own fear, he might have discovered the painting was gone and become obsessed with what had happened to it instead. Who had it? Were they taking care of it? Would the painting persevere? That obsession would give him more than enough incentive as an adult to accompany his friend Boris in a risky chase after it, rather than be bullied into going. But as it stands, Theo’s fear and his motivations seem thin, and he never gets the chance to take action in his own life, to rescue himself. Instead, that rescue has to come from outside. It’s just not satisfying, especially after journeying thorough all those pages to get there.

And then there is the little detail of the terrorist bombing itself, which after it happens, is never mentioned again, not in the sense of an impactful, historic event. How had the museum changed afterward? Wouldn’t Theo wonder who had did it and why? Wouldn’t he encounter reminders, such as the inevitable annual memorial? Tartt provides all this detail, but can’t satisfy the reader on these points–that feels like a cheat.

There are so many things to like about this book, and so many reasons I wanted to love it. But I have to wonder if it asks too much of us readers, to give it so many hours of our precious reading time. In the end, when Tartt has quite a lot she wants to say about the importance of art and uses Theo to say it, I’m not there with her. I want to feel the same exhilaration I felt after reading The Secret History, but I just can’t. show less

Teljes joggal lelkendezhetnék én is az epikus próza diadaláról, a történetmesélés öröméről, aminek az Aranypinty valóban kiemelkedő reprezentánsa – hisz micsoda bombasztikus fülszöveget lehetne írni erről a cselekményről! „Műkincsrablás! Robbantás! Feldolgozatlan traumák! A lélek éjsötétje! Barátság! Árulás! Szerelem! A felső tízezer titkai! Bűn és bűnhődés!” De csak félig lennék őszinte. Mert az a helyzet, hogy itt nem is a történet volt nekem a legüdítőbb. Mi több, a történet néha mintha elmenne szunyókálni, vagy más (látszólag) mellékes történetek helyettesítik, mint például a hosszú vegasi fejezetek idején. Ami ennek a Tartt által tökélyre vitt irodalmi show more iskolának a kulcsa, az a játékosok és a kulisszák viszonya az olvasóhoz.

Az ilyen böszme nagyregények ugyanis olyanok, akár egy horgászmellény, aminek végtelen számú feneketlen zsebe van. Ezek a zsebek a mellékszereplők és helyek, amikkel az író feltölti a szöveget. Mindegyik szereplő és hely a maga módján végtelen: minden figurából szinte kicsordul a maga sajátos stílusa, gondolkodásmódja, összetett erkölcsi szabályrendszere (ami helyenként az erkölcs hiányának tűnik) és fölényes tudása mondjuk a flamand festészetről, a bútorkárpitozásról vagy épp a bakkara játékszabályairól. Az a benyomásunk, hogy a regény lapjain túl is léteznek, a regény csak a jéghegy csúcsát mutatja meg belőlük, autonóm személyüknek egy részét, de a többi is van: tehát élnek. A helyekkel ugyanez a helyzet: csak a felszínét látjuk New Yorknak, Vegasnak, Amszterdamnak, de érezzük, hogy egy teljesség pulzál mögöttük. Ez az, amit Tartt egész egyszerűen elképesztően ír meg, és ettől érezzük azt a regény olvasásakor, hogy amiben vagyunk, az nem egy szoba, de még csak nem is egy tágas terem, hanem végtelen tér. Hogy tulajdonképpen bármerre indulnánk el benne, ott is létező személyeket és vidékeket találnánk – csak hát ugye az író arra visz minket, amerre ő akar, de mivel jó író, elfogadjuk a vezetgetést. Ilyen körítés mellett a történet vagy az írói eszközök lehetnek akármilyen triviálisak – még ha csak egy elszakadt cipőfűzőt is próbálnak pótolni hőseink 800 oldalon keresztül (amúgy nem), és még ha ezerszer is láttuk már azt a keretes szerkesztési módszert, amivel az író machinál (amúgy igen) –, nagy bajunk nem eshet. Sétafikálunk egy csodálatosat – az olvasás ilyen is lehet. show less

- 2018 End of Year Review - *written 12/31/18

Synopsis: The Goldfinch is a coming-of-age novel about Theo Decker, a young man raised in New York, who survives a terrorist attack that kills his mother. Following her death, Theo is tossed from home to home. Due to a variety of circumstances, as well as some deeply troubling choices, Theo finds himself still haunted by the attack decades down the line.

Key components: Bildungsroman, city life (specifically New York, Las Vegas & Amsterdam), the world of fine art, family and friendship, tragedy and loss, the criminal underworld

My thoughts: I don’t often compare novels to one another, but it’s so difficult not to find oneself thinking about Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations while show more reading The Goldfinch. There are too many similarities. Tartt is a fantastic writer with a real affinity for description. Despite her wordiness, it always feels like everything on the page is there for a reason. The Goldfinch is hefty at 771 pages (the longest book I read this year, by far), but I was never bored. There are three distinct sections which Tartt weaves effortlessly together, despite some rather large time jumps. Theo is also not a heroic character, in fact, he’s far from it, but the longer I spent with him, the more justified his actions became. By the end, I felt like we were one, which was a beautiful and frightening experience. show less

I'm on page 40 of 771 of The Goldfinch: Amazing first chapter that I read last night. I haven't been transported into a characters life and emotions in that way for years. I had a lump in the pit of my stomach and had a racing heart and felt as bewildered and terrified as Theo. If the rest of the book is anything like those first pages it deserves all the accolades. — 7 hours, 0 min ago — update status

Finished just minutes ago. First my complaints. There were one or two times the book bogged down for me. Things that went on seemingly too long or in too much detail. Ok. That's the complaint. That said I always looked forward to picking it up again and had trouble stopping once I started reading.


For the most part this book has some show more of the best writing I've read. Ever. Scenes so vivid that I had physiological responses of fear or longing or loneliness. Places that were described so well that I could not only see them , but also smell and hear them. Many of the characters were horribly flawed, but remained sympathetic and likable. I was on Theo's side, despite his self absorption. The story and the themes of the story will keep me thinking for a long time. I won't forget this book like I do so many others. I wish I could give four and a half stars. It's a keeper. show less