The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

 

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt is a whopping 864 pages about...hm...a young boy, Theo, who loses his mother in a bombing at a museum, and he steals a painting and then has to live his life dealing with the trauma of the violent death of his mother while keeping the painting safe when his own safety is frequently uncertain. Along the way, we meet his unpredictable best friend, an antiques dealer who takes Theo in and teaches him the business, and another young person who was in the museum when the bomb went off. 

I read The Secret History by this author and had some strong thoughts about it. Basically, I was confused by the random sex and drug use, but thought the tone was interesting and the moral ambiguity made me question myself. 

One time I was with a couple of friends as they picked up two carts full of food from a grocery store deli for a family party they were hosting. The checkout clerk didn't charge them for all the food and so one of them went to the customer service counter to deal with this while I went with the other person to load the car. They were in a bit of a hurry because they needed to get to the location where the party was and get set up and I found myself admitting that if I had been them, I wouldn't have fixed the bill. I think what I didn't say, but thought it my head, was that I would have probably gone back later when I had more time, and dealt with it, but I think my friends just sort of thought I was a thief. It's this sort of moral ambiguity (would I have really gone back later? or am I just fooling myself?) that Tartt's writing brings up for me.

But there's so much lying and drug/alcohol use in this book and I just really struggle with relating to any of the characters. They're all sort of self-absorbed and terrible. 

There is the hysterical Goodreads review:

And I have to agree that anxiety is the key element of this book. I just was anxious every time Theo got drunk or took a pill or stupid Boris was on the page. I was anxious whenever Theo was lying to Hobie. I mean, props to Tartt for making me feel so strongly, but I'm honestly not sure the payoff was worth it at all. Especially considering it was a billion pages long. 

3/5 stars

Carel Fabritius - www.mauritshuis.nl 1654, oil on panel, The Goldfinch

Lines of note:

I’d been in trouble at school for a while. It had all started, or begun to snowball rather, when my father had run off and left my mother and me some months before; we’d never liked him much, and my mother and I were generally much happier without him, but other people seemed shocked and distressed at the abrupt way he’d abandoned us (without money, child support, or forwarding address)...(location 118)

I sometimes think that my parents would both have been happier had they gotten a divorce. I mean, sure, it would have been hard, but maybe it would have been better? It sounds like Theo's dad running off may have been the best thing for all involved, honestly.

My standoffish dad had hated this about her—her tendency to engage in conversation with waitresses, doormen, the wheezy old guys at the dry cleaner’s. (location 131)

Imagine being the kind of person who can just talk to strangers!

Like a fashion drawing come to life, she turned heads wherever she went, gliding along obliviously without appearing to notice the turbulence she created in her wake; her eyes were spaced far apart, her ears were small, high-set, and very close to her head, and her body was long-waisted and thin, like an elegant weasel’s. (location 1205)

Sometimes I got the feeling that Tartt doesn't care much for women.

I MIGHT HAVE LIKED Xandra in other circumstances—which, I guess, is sort of like saying I might have liked the kid who beat me up if he hadn’t beat me up. (location 3636)

Ha ha ha. I laughed at this. 

It was hard to believe that my dad could be dead when his cigarettes were still on the kitchen counter and his old white tennis shoes were still by the back door. (location 5451)

So evocative.

Not every apartment we saw had been vacated for reasons of tragedy, as I somehow believed. The fact that I smelled divorce, bankruptcy, illness and death in almost every space we viewed was clearly delusional—and, besides, how could the troubles of these previous tenants, real or imagined, harm Kitsey or me? (location 8078)

My husband's cousin once said he'd never move into a "used house" because you never know what could have happened there. That's actually what I love about my old house. Imagine the stories it could tell!

Because, here’s the truth: life is catastrophe. The basic fact of existence—of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do—is catastrophe. Forget all this ridiculous ‘Our Town’ nonsense everyone talks: the miracle of a newborn babe, the joy of one simple blossom, Life You Are Too Wonderful To Grasp, etc. For me—and I’ll keep repeating it doggedly till I die, till I fall over on my ungrateful nihilistic face and am too weak to say it: better never born, than born into this cesspool. (location 12, 419)

Let's be honest, shall we? This is why I don't care much for Tartt's books. It's such a negative view of life. And we only get one life to live - might as well celebrate while we can.

Things I looked up:

Johntay and Keshawn Divens (location 1156) - I think these are names Tartt made up about a news story. The direct line is "Recently, the New York Post had been full of Johntay and Keshawn Divens, the eleven-year-old twins who had been raped by their foster father and starved nearly to death, up around Morningside Heights." I can find no further information, though.

Dundee cake (location 2701) - a traditional Scottish fruit cake

General Herkimer (location 2703) - an American military officer who fought during the Revolutionary War and died of wounds he sustained during the Battle of Oriskany

Chlorotic (location 4180) - yellowing of leaf tissue due to a lack of chlorophyll 

Köchel numbers (location 5990) - The Köchel catalogue is a chronological catalogue of compositions by Mozart, originally created by Ludwig Ritter von Köchel.

Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee, the only seascape he’d ever painted, according to rumor all but ruined from being stored improperly. Vermeer’s masterpiece The Love Letter, cut off its stretchers by a hotel waiter, flaking and creased from being sandwiched under a mattress. Picasso’s Poverty and Gauguin’s Tahitian Landscape, water-damaged after being hidden by some numbskull in a public toilet. In my obsessive reading the story that haunted me most was Caravaggio’s Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence, stolen from the oratory of San Lorenzo and slashed from the frame so carelessly that the collector who’d commissioned the theft had burst out crying when he saw it and refused to take it. (location 9729) - I looked up these paintings and added anything about their thefts if I thought it was interesting.

By Rembrandt - www.gardnermuseum.org : The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, 1633 oil on canvas, stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in 1990. 

Vermeer, c. 1669-1670, oil on canvas, The Love Letter

Jean Harlow’s husband, who killed himself on their wedding night. George Sanders’s had been the best, an Old Hollywood classic, my father had known it by heart and liked to quote from it. Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. And then, Hart Crane. Pivot and drop, shirt ballooning as he fell. Goodbye everybody! A shouted farewell, jumping off ship. (location 11,625)

Jean Harlow's husband died by suicide two months after their wedding, not on their wedding night.