The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

‘While I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years.’
The opening line outlines the narrative- a flashback story that takes us into the life of Theo Decker, a thirteen year old boy who loses his mother in a bomb explosion at a museum in New York. Starting from that point, Theo reveals how his life got stuck in a time loop. I almost felt as if that moment was caught locked in slow motion where bits of the debris from the explosion kept spreading its radius into his life even after the fact and the shrapnel from the explosion shaped the events until the dream pressing into the character’s innards awaiting relief. That I believe is the heart of the book!

How does one deal with death? How does one deal with loneliness and why one moves towards the flame like moth driven to death or annihilation and whether good comes from bad, or bad from good or is good only possible from good and bad only from bad? These questions are suddenly crammed up at the end of the action to justify the meandering in the rest of the book! However somehow it seems to fit even though the meandering seems a bit direction less in the middle!

Donna creates a large landscape with some very detailed brush strokes that create a contrast of characters and setting. The narrative moves from New York to Vegas and back to New York until the story picks up pace and sees some action towards the end. In between the landscape is dotted with too much thinking, dialogue, reminiscing and imagining especially between Theo and Boris. The narrative can be heavy as language is modern, thoughts are ancient and characters are contemporary and setting is almost old world!

She’s crafted a range of characters that are all in some way connected to Theo and his survival. She could be a modern Thomas Hardy with too much description, a bulky narrative and a huge emotional trauma that the central character flawed in some way is facing from one single point when life undergoes a dramatic shift and enters the time loop! Is this book allegorical or just tries to be at the end, I wonder?

An interesting read!








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