BOOK 203: THE GOLDFINCH: DONNA TARTT

The novel is a coming-of-age tale told in the first person. The protagonist, 13-year-old Theodore Decker, survives a terrorist bombing at an art museum where his mother dies. While staggering through the debris, he takes with him a small Dutch Golden Age painting called The Goldfinch. It becomes a singular source of hope for him as he descends into a world of crime.

The painting is one of the few surviving works by Rembrandt's most promising pupil, Carel Fabritius. (Almost all of Fabritius' works were destroyed in the Delft explosion of 1654, in which the artist himself was killed.)

This novel won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Booklist wrote, "Drenched in sensory detail, infused with Theo's churning thoughts and feelings, sparked by nimble dialogue, and propelled by escalating cosmic angst and thriller action, Tartt's trenchant, defiant, engrossing, and rocketing novel conducts a grand inquiry into the mystery and sorrow of survival, beauty and obsession, and the promise of art."Amazon selected the novel as the 2013 Best Book of the Year.

The novel spent over thirty weeks on the New York Times bestseller listin the U.S. and on the Sunday Times hardcover fiction bestseller list in the UK.

FILM ADAPTATION: John Crowley directed a film adaptation for Warner Bros. and Amazon Studios. Ansel Elgort plays the main role of Theo, and Aneurin Barnard plays Boris.

MY VERDICT: I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I found the protagonist to be quite unlikable for the most part but that didn’t stop me from wanting to know what will happen to him throughout his life and what has happened to the painting of the Goldfinch. If I was to have only one criticism it’s that the end dragged on a little too long, but it was worth waiting for.

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