This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and (if not signed in) for advertising. By using LibraryThing you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Your use of the site and services is subject to these policies and terms.
A young boy in New York City, Theo Decker, miraculously survives an accident that takes the life of his mother. Alone and abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by a friend's family and struggles to make sense of his new life. In the years that follow, he becomes entranced by one of the few things that reminds him of his mother; a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the art underworld.… (more)
BookshelfMonstrosity: Paintings are at the heart of these hefty novels, both of which combine the antics of a heist novel with ruminations on literature, history, and loss. Memorable characters and rich details add to the enjoyment of both books.
Oof. The book was profoundly disturbing but I could not put it down. Slogged through Theo's bad decisions. Slogged through the pages that desperately needed editing (descriptions were sometimes amazing, sometimes just eye-crossingly self-indulgent). Slogged through the inconsistencies and plot holes (don't give characters cell phones and then not have them use them). Then in the last few pages the whole story redeemed itself. Maybe it's just because everything was looking up...Glad it's over but glad I read it. ( )
This book should have been cut in half and it would have been fantastic. As it was it took me over 100 pages to really get into it and when I hit the 500 page mark I just didn't care anymore. I finished because it was for bookclub. ( )
This story follows a young boy who loses his mother and learns to navigate life on his own. It felt original but also reminded me of Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, a retelling of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. These three books share that autobiographical style, blending linear storytelling with truths, omissions, and later reveals. It’s about how a young boy, Theo, copes with losing a parent, the people he learns to trust, and how he forms his moral compass in the face of the world’s injustices. Like Demon Copperhead, themes of drug abuse are heavy in this one. This book is slow and dense but also captivating, beautiful, and painful. Many descriptive passages might have been annoying in another book, but they helped me really picture the scenes. The sense of nihilism and beauty is so heartbreakingly captured, moving me to tears more than once. Theo grows in every way throughout the story, and his motivations are clear even from childhood. This is a serious, powerful book. It takes energy to read and is more upsetting than soothing, but I recommend it for its emotional impact. ( )
I spent months reading this book and I just can't believe it's over... I wish it had more pages now XD. But this was genuinely one of the most immersive experiences I've ever had with a book. Donna Tart's writing is impeccable. She makes sure that you get exactly what she wants you to know, be it background information about the environment or barely anything. I genuinely felt like I was living Theo's life along with him, and for that I probably will never stop thinking about this. The story is so complex yet so human, I don't understand why I haven't read this sooner. I tend to stick with fantasy and scifi books since that is what I know, but this book has single-handedly convinced me that I would love the literary fiction world aswell. But besides that, I will never get over Theo and his pretty little painting (to oversimplify it :p) This may not be a book for everyone, but it was the book for me ( )
Good things are worth waiting for. . . a tour de force that will be among the best books of 2013.
added by 4leschats | editBookPage, Megan Fishmann(Nov 1, 2013)
It’s my happy duty to tell you that in this case, all doubts and suspicions can be laid aside. “The Goldfinch” is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind. I read it with that mixture of terror and excitement I feel watching a pitcher carry a no-hitter into the late innings. You keep waiting for the wheels to fall off, but in the case of “The Goldfinch,” they never do.
The absurd does not liberate; it binds. ALBERT CAMUS
Dedication
For Mother, For Claude
First words
While I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years.
Quotations
It seemed like the kind of room where a call girl or a stewardess would be murdered on television.
He's telling you that living things don't last—it's all temporary. Death in life. That's why they're called natures mortes. Maybe you don't see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer—there it is.
Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.
But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.
When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a flickering sun-struck instant that existed now and forever. Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch's ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature—fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.
I looked like some cult-raised kid just rescued by local law enforcement, brought blinking from some basement stocked with firearms and powdered milk.
Even in some smoky post-catastrophe Manhattan, you could imagine him swaying genially at the door in the rags of his former uniform, the Barbours up in the apartment burning old National Geographics for warmth, living off gin and tinned crabmeat.
The problem (as I'd learned, repeatedly) was that thirty-six hours in, with your body in full revolt, and the remainder of your un-opiated life stretching out bleakly ahead of you like a prison corridor, you needed some fairly compelling reason to keep moving forward into darkness, rather than falling straight back into the gorgeous feather mattress you'd so foolishly abandoned.
To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole...
I was different, but it wasn't. As the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological static just as random as the street lamps flashing past.
Who was it said that coincidence was just God's way of remaining anonymous?
...beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.
A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don't get to choose our own hearts. We can't make ourselves want what's good for us or what's good for other people. We don't get to choose the people we are.
And as much as I'd like to believe there's a truth beyond illusion, I've come to believe that there's no truth beyond illusion. Because, between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.
“You'd be surprised...what small everyday things can lift us out of despair. But nobody can do it for you. You're the one who has to watch for the open door.” (Mrs. Swanson)
When we are sad...it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the things that don't change. (Hobie)
It was the secret no one told you, the thing you had to learn for yourself: viz. that in the antiques trade there was really no such thing as a “correct” price. Objective value—list value—was meaningless. If a customer came in clueless with money in hand (as most of them did) it didn't matter what the books said, what the experts said, what similar items at Christie's had recently gone for. An object—any object was worth whatever you could get somebody to pay for it. (Theo)
“Oh, Theo! Isn't he adorable? Kitsey unexpectantly thrusting a friend's newborn at me—me in all sincere horror leaping back as if from a lighted match.
What you want to live and be happy in this world is a woman who has her own life and lets you have yours.(Boris)
“Well—I have to say I personally have never drawn such a sharp line between ‘good' and ‘bad' as you. For me: that line is often false. The two are never disconnected. One can't exist without the other. As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how. But you—wrapped up in judgment, always regretting the past, cursing yourself, blaming yourself, asking ‘what if,' ‘what if.' ‘Life is cruel.' ‘I wish I had died instead of.' Well—think about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no—hang on—this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can't get there any other way?”
“the world is much stranger than we know or can say. And I know how you think, or how you like to think, but maybe this is one instance where you can't boil down to pure ‘good' or pure ‘bad' like you always want to do—? Like, your two different piles? Bad over here, good over here? Maybe not quite so simple. Because—all the way driving here, driving all night, Christmas lights on the motorway and I'm not ashamed to tell you, I got choked up—because I was thinking, couldn't help it, about the Bible story—? you know, where the steward steals the widow's mite, but then the steward flees to far country and invests the mite wisely and brings back thousandfold cash to widow he stole from? And with joy she forgave him, and they killed the fatted calf, and made merry?” “I think that's maybe not all the same story.”
My eyes darted nervously around the living room. My mother's book ("Jane and Prudence", Barbara Pym) face-down on the back of the sofa.
The social workers ... took clipboards and pens from their briefcases ... Enrique signed his name with a flourish. "Can't promise anything," he said, clicking his pen and sticking it back in his pocket.
I lay awake in Welty's old room, his old reading glasses and fountain pens still in the desk drawers.
Last words
And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.
A young boy in New York City, Theo Decker, miraculously survives an accident that takes the life of his mother. Alone and abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by a friend's family and struggles to make sense of his new life. In the years that follow, he becomes entranced by one of the few things that reminds him of his mother; a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the art underworld.
▾Library descriptions
No library descriptions found.
▾LibraryThing members' description
Book description
Qui est Theo ? Que lui est il arrivé à New York pour qu'il soit quatorze ans plus tard , cloîtré dans une chambre d'hôtel à Amsterdam comme une bête traquée ? D'où vient cette toile de maître , Le Chardonneret , qu'il transporte partout avec lui ?
Ce roman laisse le lecteur essouflé , éblouï et encore une fois conquis par le talent hors du commun de Donna TARTT.
Haiku summary
Liked a goldfinch chained / Booze, drugs can't erase the pain / Of his mother's death (LynnB)
Blast kills mother. Painting of a goldfinch dominates life's remainder. (Bebedee)
)
)
)
)
Google Books — Loading...
The Goldfinch SPOILERS ALLOWED
Wikipedia in English (1)
5