The Goldfinch

I got on the list at the library for the audio version of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch 7 months ago, and finally got to have a turn at it in Dec/Jan.  It was wonderful--all 26 disks of it.  I'm so glad that I went for the audio version as I think the reader, David Pittu, really added so much to the story with his voices for the various characters, particularly Boris.  I ended up getting a paper copy to finish the book because I couldn't finish it by the due date (6 weeks doing errands in the car couldn't quite get me to the end of the book), and I missed Pittu's accents and inflections and overall narration in the closing pages of the book.

Much as I liked the book, and it is a long, sweeping story, I admit that I was ready for the part in Las Vegas to be over much sooner than the actual story called for, but then I love reading stories set in NYC, where the bulk of the story took place.

In a nutshell, The Goldfinch is the story of Theo Decker, who we meet as a 13 year old boy who loses his mother in a horrific terrorist attack, and spends the next 10 years of his life essentially dealing with the post-traumatic stress that just about consumes him.  I think Tartt did a terrific job of getting inside the head of a 13 year old, which is a jumble of half-learned truths and a whole lot of misconceptions.

At first, I was thinking that Tartt was brave to choose 1st person for her narrative--after all she's a middle-aged woman--but then I remembered that her other major work, The Secret History, was also a 1st person story with a college-aged man being the protagonist.  Now, it seems that Tartt has a knack for getting in the head of criminally-oriented, self-effacing young men.

I like stories the springboard off of art--I'm a big fan of The Girl With the Pearl Earring and The Lady and the Unicorn, for example--but this one is different.  Rather than giving the reader a fictionalized backstory of a painting, Tartt uses a 1654 painting of a goldfinch by Carel Fabritius as the lynchpin in Theo's personal story.  The painting triggers catastrophe in Theo's life and his response to it and relationship to it shape almost every action and reaction that he has in his life.

As with The Secret History, I was profoundly skeptical that any adolescent could consume the amount of drugs and alcohol that Theo and his Russian friend, Boris, do during their time in Las Vegas, but that could be tempered by my middle-aged fuddy-duddy nature shining through.

I did like the character of Boris quite a bit--I have to say, he is the most engaging criminal adolescent since I met the Artful Dodger in Dickens' Oliver Twist when I was in my teens.

I found myself thinking about all the various parents and surrogate parents and came to view The Goldfinch as a study in parenting to some degree.  There's Theo's mother, of course--why she didn't spell out guardianship for Theo in her will, given the powderkeg that was Theo's father completely baffled me--apart from that glaring omission she was a good parent.

Theo's father and Xandra were complete enablers and leading contenders for "worst parents in the world," except that Boris's father could probably edge them out.  The Barbours are weird parents, whose offspring reflect their misaligned approach to parenting...from bully/drifter Platt, to poor Andy, to ice-princess Kitzy, to TedKennedyesque Toddy.

Hobie is wonderful, nuturing parent, although perhaps a tad too trusting and naive.  I sincerely hope that Bill Nighy gets the role in the upcoming movie version as he is who I pictured in the role from the minute I met Hobie in the book.

Bill Nighy as Hobie in my dream cast for the movie.

Welty, must get the prize for best parent in the book, to both Theo and the wonderfully drawn Pippa, my absolutely favorite character in the book.  I found it perfect that she and Boris, the angel and devil characters who sit on Theo's shoulder and try to guide him, instinctively liked each other.  Given my view of Boris and Pippa as Janus-type guardian angels, you can argue that they play foster parent roles in Theo's life as well.

I loved the writing of The Goldfinch--Tartt created a rich, varied, multi-textured, layered world that was entirely believable but also an alternate universe to the one I inhabit.  I found Theo's story fascinating and the pacing perfect--focusing on minutes and days for chapters and then leaping forward by years to focus again minutely.

The story (art and the art underworld), the characters, the writing, the details were all spot on.  Great book, worth the time to read or listen to it.  Much, much better than The Secret History.

Big Book Summer Challenge - checkpoint

When I signed up for the Big Book Challenge earlier in the summer, I figured that Diana Gabaldon's latest, Written in My Heart's Own Blood, would be the only book that I read this summer that would qualify (i.e., >400 pages).

Boy was I ever wrong!

I'm 633 pages into the 822 pages of Written in My Heart's Own Blood, and loving it.  I'm glad I'm reading it slowly--just one section per week.  This way I have time to enjoy the story and characters and all the details that Gabaldon so painstakingly adds that makes her fictional world seem so real.

I'm also 324 pages into the 601 pages that is John Steinbeck's East of Eden.  Man, how I love this book.  I haven't read it in over 30 years and it is simply wonderful.  I just read the "timshel" section of the book where Lee expounds on the Cain and Abel story and the importance of the phrase "thou mayest."  I can't wait to visit Steinbeck country in September when I go out to visit my daughter in San Francisco.  In addition to Monterey, I'm planning on visiting Salinas and maybe King City when we go to Pinnacles National Park (hoping to see some California Condors)

I read all 576 pages of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, and reviewed it here.  I was half-way through with it before I realized it was an official "big book."

Beatriz Williams' A Hundred Summers qualified as a "big book" with 432 pages.  I reviewed it here.

Daughter of the Forest, by Juliet Marillier, was my first "big book" of the season, clocking in at 560 pages.  I read it in June with the GoodReads TuesBookTalk Read-a-Longs.  I cannot believe I never got around to reviewing it as I did enjoy it and am looking forward to reading the next book in this very interesting series.

Since I'm an English major and my mantra is "you do the math," I got out my calculator to discover that I have read 2525 pages in my Big Book Challenge so far this summer, and that's not counting the books I read that didn't have the page count required.

So yeah, I guess I like to read.

Hope you're all have a wonderful summer, reading what makes you happy, and enjoying life.

The Secret History

Bennington College, Vermont, author Donna Tartt's alma mater

I finished Donna Tartt's The Secret History last week.  What an interesting book.

I blogged about it a bit when I featured it in a First Chapter-First Paragraph, but it really deserves its own post as well although I seem unable to form a coherent theme to write about so I'll just share some random thoughts.

The Secret History reminded me somewhat of A Separate Peace--a similar academic setting but the characters in The Secret History are older (in college not high school), though not necessarily more mature. And there were shades of Lord of the Flies (another book from my sophomore year of high school)--it's an examination of what happens when children (and the young adults in The Secret History, despite their facade of independence are little more than children) are left to run amok.

It's a fairly dark book, with a motley collection of interesting but mostly amoral characters who drink to excess.  Honestly, with the amount of drinking in this book, I was amazed that any of the main characters remained alive by novel's end.  That makes me sound like an old fuddy-duddy, but I was amazed by how much hard liquor these 20-year-olds could consume without suffering from alcohol poisoning.

It seems I can't read a book anymore without it reminding of another book and this book reminded me of lots of books, apparently...but it did also remind me of Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier in that the hero commits murder and the reader really wants him to get away with it.

I was surprised by the lackluster ending.  Those of you who have read the book might be surprised to find that I found the ending lackluster, but I had envisioned so much more.  ***SPOILER: I thought that the professor of the classics students, Julian, was more involved in the murder. I thought of him as a catalyst or Dionysus figuring who actively but covertly urged his students to experiment with madness.  In the end, he was just a weak man who really viewed his role as more of a hobby than a responsibility.

I did think this a pretty interesting novel--I didn't fall in love with it, and I'm not sure I would reread it--but it was definitely an interesting premise and well-crafted novel.

Here's a good review of it in The Guardian and the comments following the article are worth reading--they run the gambit from "greatest book ever" to "tedious and shallow."  I'm in the ever-ambiguous "interesting" category.

The is the sixth book in my TBR Pile Challenge for 2014.  Making headway!

First Chapter First Paragraph ~ Tuesday Intros - The Secret History

Every Tuesday, Bibliophile By the Sea hosts First Chapter First Paragraph- Tuesday Intros and invites readers to post the beginning of books they are reading or about to read or would like to read.

I'm currently more than half way through The Secret History, by Donna Tartt.  It's one of those books with a cultish following, and I can see why.  It takes place in a small liberal arts college in Vermont and the first-person narrator is a 20-year old student from California who enrolls in a classics program that has only five other students.  They take the study of Greek, history, language, culture and ethics very seriously.

Here's the opening of the Prologue:

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.  He'd been dead for ten days before they found him, you know.  It was one of the biggest manhunts in Vermont history--state troopers, the FBI, even an army helicopter; the college closed, the dye factory in Hampden shut down, people coming from New Hampshire, upstate New York, as far away as Boston.

It is difficult to believe that Henry's modest plan could have worked so well despite these unforeseen events.  We hadn't intended to hide the body where it couldn't be found.  In fact, we hadn't hidden it at all but had simply left it where it fell in hopes that some luckless passer-by would stumble over it before anyone even noticed he was missing.

I'm hard pressed to think of another novel that starts by giving away the plot so completely at the outset, but then this story is not about whether the college kids kill their irksome friend, but whether they get away with it.  And that I don't know.

I'm enjoying the book though thankfully I'm having a hard time relating to either the main character or his fellow students.  Tartt, however, is a marvelous writer and Richard, her first-person narrator reminds me a lot of Nick Carraway from Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

Anybody else read this?  Does this opening intrigue you?  Can you think of any other novels that seemingly give away the story before it even begins as this one does?