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THE
GOLDFINCH

by Donna Tartt

Cover Summary

Aged thirteen, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and an absent father, miraculously survives a catastrophe that otherwise tears his life apart. Alone and rudderless in New York, he is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend.

Theo is tormented by longing for his mother and down the years he clings to the thing that most reminds him of her: a small, captivating painting that ultimately dwars him into the criminal underworld.

Reading The Goldfinch

This was my first Donna Tartt read, I’d heard about it through a friend and seen it online before. I know it’s the inferior of Tartt’s other novels and while I enjoyed some parts, I felt that it mostly really dragged with an unneccessary level of detail that at times annoyed me and I found myself skimming on some pages. While it wasn’t enough to make me put the book down, I think it could have been a much shorter and better read.

 

What I liked

Environments
The main character, Theo, moves through multiple environments throughout the book; his mother’s cosy apartment, the Barbour’s wealthy home decked with things you shouldn’t touch, the Las Vegas desert landscape, Hobie’s apartment stacked to bursting with antiques. The author did a really good job of placing us in each setting and exhibiting how Theo’s behaviour reflected his current situation.

Artistic themes and plots
I also really liked that the book’s plot is centred around the world of art, from masterpieces in museums to the antiques trade, the criminal underworld and so on.

Boris
While I didn’t like most of the characters, including Theo himself who is a total bore, the Barbours who are themselves a snoozefest on a level of its own, and little lucid Pippa, Boris was an extraordinary creation! From his background surviving in the most inhospitable cities around the world, to just his way of getting through life, he’s pretty much a legend of a character and I may have a little crush on him.

“Anyways, the secret is to always fix their attention away from where the slippery stuff’s going on.
That’s the first law of magic, Specs. Never forget it.”

What I wasn’t too keen about

Excessively lengthy descriptions of… everything
The book was great up until Theo loses his mother in a terrorist attack, whereas everything after that took a downward spiral for me while reading it. The storytelling is way off and Tartt trades off proper consolidation of the plot in favour of endless introspection, waaay too much detail about Theo’s drug use and furniture repair that spanned pages and pages, and just plain old drudgery. At sompe points it got mega boring and I skipped entire pages, including the last five.

Why did Welty tell him to steal the painting?
The whole crux and point of the story is to find out why, in his last dying words, Welty asked Theo to steal the Goldfinch, what was the meaning behind it. We get a watery explenation that this was his favourite painting growing up, but that doesn’t sum up with Welty’s warning that someone else is after it. We never really find out the details behind this except for one Mr.Reeves demanding the paining, but zero completion of this very important part of the story.

Theo
Oh my god, what a boring main character and what a series of awful decisions that just cannot be justified unless we all admit he’s an extreme idiot.

All in all…

I have conflicting emotions about this book because some parts I loved, some parts I truly hated. When I find myself skimming whole pages, that’s a bad sign and I’m still a little baffled about how it managed to pull the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. All in all, I’m just relieved I managed to finish this one and not have to ever pick it up again. Having said that, I still want to read Donna Tartt’s A Secret History, and hoping it will be tons better than this one.