www.annemoore.net

 

 

 

 

 

Reading in Montreal: Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch”

To and from Montreal last weekend I carried Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, a 771 page hardback. No regrets.

I had a wonderful time in Montreal, visiting my sweet son Evan, who’s a student at McGill University. I was smiling ear to ear at the prospect of spending a weekend with him in a world city, eating steak frites and drinking bols of cafe au lait. Also, stopping in at the Musee des Beaux Arts for a mostly forgettable exhibit of Venetian art and musical instruments from the Renaissance and a wholly memorable show of photographs, by Canadians, from the 70’s. http://www.mbam.qc.ca/en/

Even with all the touring and eating, I had lots of time to read: waiting for and during Porter Airlines very civilized flights and at my chic hotel, Le Meridien Versailles. www.lemeridienversailleshotel.com. I read mornings before our day would begin and nights after the day had ended.

It’s a behemoth of a book (Kindle, I know! But I don’t like reading on a device.) Truly, I should have been charged a baggage fee.

I’m not complaining! I love an oversized read. Like a Charles Dickens’ novel — and this is most certainly a twist on a Dickens novel — this book kept me company.

Thirteen year old New Yorker Theo Decker loses his stylish mother in a terrorist blast at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There, Theo is given an unusual gold ring from a dying man, the name of a shop, and a priceless Dutch painting, Carel Fabritus’ 1654 The Goldfinch, no bigger than a laptop.

The ring brings Theo to a Greenwich Village address that will one day be his home and place of work. Before and after that, the story takes our hero — and that painting — from New York to Las Vegas to New York and on to Amsterdam. Along the way, Theo steals and abuses drugs and alcohol, rescues a dog, fakes the provenance of antiques, falls into a disloyal love, loses the painting, and gets involved in a fatal shoot-out over that painting. Suicidal, he receives a ghostly visit from…

This read is best understood as a mash up Dickens’ Great Expectations and Dan Chaon’s gothic thriller Await Your Reply.

Tartt is a smooth writer. I never once lost interest in the story, in spite of her preachiness, her tendency to tell instead of show. (Theo is in love with Pippa: got it. Art is worth saving and sharing with all mankind. Noted.) I didn’t even especially like Theo — mmm, a drug abusing art thief — but I stayed with this story.

What a cast of characters! I especially enjoyed the well-drawn Barbour family, and Hobie, the antique-furniture expert who opens his heart and home and business to Theo.

I finished The Goldfinch on the last leg of my journey back to Chicago. Did I love it? No. Can I recommend it? Yes. It was a fat long read, a welcome travel companion.

Also in the blog

Books: Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life”

I love a good, long read. The book becomes a part of me, an extension of my arms, I panic when I don’t remember where I’ve set it. At 720 pages, Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life is one of those reads. I carried it around for more than a week, and I loved it —

(...)

Chicago: Lunch in the Sun

After a particularly brutal winter and a long, cold spring we here in Chicago are desperate for sun and warmth. People stand at street corners or outside office buildings, faces lifted to the sun. Not waiting for the Rapture. Or sneaking a smoke. They’re jones-ing for a hit of sunshine. So it’s understandable that we

(...)

Books: Best of 2012

“Indeed, reading might even kill them, as was said in the Scots Magazine in 1774, to have been the case with the wife of the First Earl of Effingham. One night, in her rooms at Hampton Court, she became so absorbed in her book that she failed to notice that her clothes had caught fire.

(...)

14 thoughts on "Reading in Montreal: Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch”"