Name: kay's review of The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
Item: The Goldfinch
Rating: 3.5
Author: kay

Donna Tartt

A young New Yorker grieving his mother's death is pulled into a gritty underworld of art and wealth in this "extraordinary" and beloved Pulitzer Prize winner from the author of "The Secret History" that "connects with the heart as well as the mind" (Stephen King, New York Times Book Review).

Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by a longing for his mother, he clings to the one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into a wealthy and insular art community.

As an adult, Theo moves silkily between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of an antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love — and at the center of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.

The Goldfinch

Abigail F

 They want it all as detailed as possible because even the tiniest things mean something, Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life—a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple—the painter is giving you a secret message. 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."

 As it was, she died when I was a kid; and though everything that's happened to me since then is thoroughly my own fault, still when I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life.

aywen

That life—whatever else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time—so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. 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.

Storm

And I feel I have something very serious and urgent to say to you, my non-existent reader, and I feel I should say it as urgently as if I were standing in the room with you. That life—whatever else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we're not always so glad to be here, it's our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time—so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. 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.

“…Goodness written all over him and yet always that twitch of worry and disquiet. That subtle shade of the betrayer.”

It was better never to have been born—never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.

Most people seemed satished with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget It: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom.

But depression wasn't the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavour from the dawn of time The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death… And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game.

margo

And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky—so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

It’s not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn’t understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you bloom out and out and out. 

A self one does not want. A heart one cannot help.

She was the golden thread running through everything, a lens that magnified beauty so that the whole world stood transfigured in relation to her, and her alone.

For years she had been the first thing I remembered when I woke up, the last thing that drifted through my mind as I went to sleep, and during the day she came to me obtrusively, obsessively, always with a painful shock…

 wen

And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time — so too has love.

Yet even in death my dad was ineradicable, no matter how hard I tried to wish him out of the picture — for there he always was, in my hands and my voice and my walk, in my darting sideways glance…

Andy had chosen Japanese as his second language precisely because he had such a thing for fanservice miko and slutty manga girls in sailor uniforn. Japanese from Japan?

But inwardly I was almost drunk at the lift in his mood-the same flood of elation I'd felt as a small child when the silences broke, when his footsteps grew light again and you heard him laughing at something, humming at the shaving mirror.

Ashna Nirula

Across those unbridgeable distances — between bird and painter, painting and viewer —I hear only too well what's being said to me, a psst from an alleyway as Hobie put it, across four hundred years of time, and it's really very personal and specific. It's there in the light-rinsed atmosphere, the brush strokes he permits us to see, up close, for exactly what they are —hand worked flashes of pigment, the very passage of the bristles visible —and then, at a distance, the miracle, or the joke as Horst called it, although really it's both, the slide of transubstantiation where paint is paint and yet also feather and bone. It's the place where reality strikes the ideal, where a joke becomes serious and anything serious is a joke. The magic point where every idea and its opposite are equally true.

beautiful passage and writing is something i am envious of

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; but ever since the painting had vanished from under me I'd felt drowned and extinguished by vastness — not just the predictable vastness of time, and space, but the impassable distances between people even when they were within arm's reach of each other, and with a swell of vertigo I thought of all the places I'd been and all the places I hadn't, a world lost and vast and unknowable, dingy maze of cities and alleyways, far-drifting ash and hostile immensi-ties, connections missed, things lost and never found, and my painting swept away on that powerful current and drifting out there somewhere: a tiny fragment of spirit, faint spark bobbing on a dark sea.

a thought that originated from theo's childhood. childhood bleeds into adulthood.

Not every apartment we saw had been vacated for reasons of tragedy, as I somehow believed. The fact that I smelled divorce, bankruptcy, illness and death in almost every space we viewed was clearly delusional - and, besides, how could the troubles of these previous tenants, real or imagined, harm Kitsey or me?

wasn't the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept f*cking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game.

Back at the Barbours', amidst the clamor and plenitude of a family that wasn't mine, I now felt even more alone than usual…

Cinnamon-colored walls, rain on the windowpanes, vast quiet and a sense of depth and distance, like the varnish over the background of a nineteenth-century painting.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2014 Aged thirteen, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and a reckless, largely absent father, survives an accident that otherwise tears his life apart. Alone and rudderless in New York, he is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. He is tormented by an unbearable longing for his mother, and down the years clings to the thing that most reminds him of her: a small, strangely captivating painting that ultimately draws him into the criminal underworld. As he grows up, Theo learns to glide between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love - and his talisman, the painting, places him at the centre of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle. The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America and a drama of enthralling power. Combining unforgettably vivid characters and thrilling suspense, it is a beautiful, addictive triumph - a sweeping story of loss and obsession, of survival and self-invention, of the deepest mysteries of love, identity and fate.

Nate

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.

None of us find enough kindness in the world.

gabs ♡

I agree with most when I say the best parts of the book was Theo’s adolescent years. Donna Tartt did amazing in portraying grief, lost, the anxiousness of being a child knowing you’ll be alone in the middle of a big city. And I wouldn’t say I hate the ending, it’s just maybe I don’t like that in the end, I am Theo. I do not understand the point, and I wish there was a grander exit, a bigger purpose or role but in fact, I’m only proving what the author was trying to convey. It’s definitely something to think about and it’s not for everybody. I don’t really like it but it is what it is. 

I don’t know. The first part was amazing, honest and heartbreaking, but the second part was kind of boring. Yes, I can see some of Dostoevsky’s analogies - but is it original, doesn’t it tell us anything new? No really. Theo just got everything by doing nothing good and ended up still reflecting and complaining about his fate. 

Tanya Gush

Not great, the plot was a total miss at points. I was also not a fan of the ending. The characters and the descriptions were very well written, in Donna's style. 

Jovana Gjekanovikj 

While some have found The Goldfinch to be painfully detailed, I liked that Tartt took her time with how she fleshed out the details. She nailed PTSD and survivor's guilt, and I felt like I made a friend in Theo.

I loved Hobbie and Popchik and how all these characters were parallels for finding a home in the most unexpected of places.

While Theo was not exactly the most likeable of characters, he did however went through a traumatic time and he was merely trying to survive after and in ways that he knew how to. Completely understandable. Wish people would stop hating on Theo (and the book by extension). 

Cherine Fok

Subliminal, as with Tartt's other works.

While some have found The Goldfinch to be painfully detailed, I liked that Tartt took her time with how she fleshed out the details. She nailed PTSD and survivor's guilt, and I felt like I made a friend in Theo.

I loved Hobbie and Popchik and how all these characters were parallels for finding a home in the most unexpected of places.

While Theo was not exactly the most likeable of characters, he did however went through a traumatic time and he was merely trying to survive after and in ways that he knew how to. Completely understandable. Wish people would stop hating on Theo (and the book by extension). 

The Goldfinch: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)

Love Donna tart and love some crime but sooooo long omds 

Ananya Jain

Entirely too long-winded for my taste, I hate to admit I had to skim through the second half to finish it at all, as it'd been years since I started it and it just went on and on. It was a good story and good writing, just too many words for me about too many things. 

Silje Løvli Lorentsen

Mia Hamilton

Probably one of the best books I’ve read. Thoroughly enjoyed it from start to finish. 

Naveen Sheik

The first 450 pages of theo's childhood was amazing. I loved those first 450 pages honestly. They were an absolute masterpiece, what with his mother's death, his loss of home, continously moving around and more. His friendship (or more than that?) was the most strongest friendship i've ever read about. Potentially, these 3 stars are given purely for their childhood friendship. I love it. And then we extended 8 years after his childhood and it was horrible. This book  is far too long, far too much goes on, the "romance" between certain characters isn't even real, the events which continue make no sense. The last 50 pages I was just clawing for it to end,  skim reading basically all of it. This book was not the greatest book, and my feedback is if you want to write a book, don't make it lengthy, because you find the randomest of events occuring, that don't make sense, and don't follow. Also, try to remind us of who the characters are every now and then, considering this book is like half the size of the bible or something. 

surtified™

Als Theo Decker dreizehn Jahre alt ist, verliert er seine Mutter durch ein tragisches Unglück. Er versinkt in tiefer Trauer. Auch das Gemälde, das verbotenerweise in seinem Besitz ist und ihn an seine Mutter erinnert, kann ihm keinen Trost spenden. Ganz im Gegenteil: Mit jedem Jahr, das vergeht, kommt er immer weiter von seinem Weg ab und droht, in kriminelle Kreise abzurutschen. Es scheint geradezu, als würde ihn das Gemälde, das ihn auf merkwürdige Weise fasziniert, in eine Welt der Lügen und falschen Entscheidungen ziehen, in einen Sog, der ihn unaufhaltsam mit sich reißt ...

Roman

Der Distelfink

Again, beautifully written, but I disliked Theo more and more throughout the book.. Hoby and Boris I loved though

Lili

I really liked parts of the book but mostly hated a lot of it. I couldn't finish the book as it was dragging on and on and I didn't find the enthusiasm I needed to finish a 700 paged book. The author kept putting unnecessary details that I didn't really care about. I also couldn't build a connection with most of the characters and didn't really care for them.

Abbie Duggan

“Why not something more typical? Why not a seascape, a landscape, a history painting, a commissioned portrait of some important person, a low-life scene of drinkers in a tavern, a bunch of tulips for heaven’s sake, rather than this lonely little captive? Chained to his perch?”

To keep it simple: this is the best book I’ve ever read.

tori 👻

Donna Tartt does it again.

I'm in love with her writing ever since The Secret History last year. The way she narrates her tales gives you the knowledge of how much this woman loves what she does. Every line of every page is beautifully put together.
Boris was fascinating to read about as was the love of one for an object, and how much it can shape them as a person. I feel like we all have a Goldfinch, perhaps not in the intensity and desperation Theo has, but I like to think we all do.
This novel was beyond beautiful, the last few pages were hard to read for how much it made me feel.

I was engrossed! Tartt writes such a compelling narrator and who is also the saddest man alive? and she does this thing where she adds a ton of question marks? to the end of half-statements? and doesn’t capitalize them? because they’re spoken by young assholes? It’s really cool. And the word choice is top notch, I learned what a margrave is and what to call a brocade and how to make a cavil statement. Really impressive for a book I got for 2 bucks!

Eli Alvah Huckabee

Elisavet Rozaki 

Incredible, all the way until its last paragraph.

Nova

this was a beautiful read and the only thing stopping me from giving it 5 stars is the word choices. also i probably wont reread, this is more like something you read when you have a lot of time, when you’re unwinding. the paragraphs tend to get very long and tedious to read. i got attached to the characters and andy broke my heart.

Eugene

I loved the journey, some moments caught me, but to be honest I expected more. The art pieces described with great love and care for their beauty, the adventure was interesting, but I expected to get more out of the characters. Sometimes they seem flat, though charismatic.

Rodrigo Figueiredo Severino

This was the first book I’ve DNFd since I got back into reading. Was super excited for this but found it profoundly dull and way too slow for me. This book could be told in 300 pages but we’re stuck with a 800 page novel where most things are boring descriptions and just honestly fluff. I’m honestly proud of myself for withstanding 500 pages of this bullshit, but I can’t no more. This book is the bane of my existance. So I’m gonna just read what happens somewhere and watch the movie maybe. Just wish I’d come to this conclusion earlier. The bane of my existance.
I also keep editing this review cuz every time I remember of something to say. Like the story of this has really interesting parts and could be really good but like by the time we get to the point I already don’t care cuz we got like 100 pages of fluff and setup.

One of the best books I've read in my life. The story is a never-ending adventure, with many pages leaving me shocked. I've recommended it to so many.

** spoiler alert **
           an overall interesting book and certainly one i enjoyed reading although i didn't find it to be on the same level as the secret history. I often found the book to be rather cliché, the characters not very well written and noticeably one-dimensional. the beginning is gorgeous and captivating but the book really starts to go downhill once Theo moves to Vegas with his father. i would've liked it more if Theo's time in Vegas would've been cut a little shorter and his time in Amsterdam, towards the end of the book, expanded.

kayla 

3.75-4ish....i loved most parts but some just dragged on and felt unnecessary

giulia

"It exists; and it keeps on existing. 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."

mikki

Gorgeous, gorgeous girls read The Goldfinch and have a love-hate relationship with it.

That's me. I loved it, but only because of Boris Pavlikovsky. Theo was so insufferable for me and through every decision he made I found him more and more unlikable. I gave it 3 stars (3.5, actually) just to appreciate Donna's prose (very wordy, but I loved it nonetheless).

I'll rewrite this review sometime in the future, but for now this'll do.

Gorgeous book with unforgettable characters and writing, 900+ pages flew by - I didn’t care for the Secret History and suspected this may be the same but it is in a whole other league better.

gabs ♡ &
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

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gabs ♡ &The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

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gabs ♡ &
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt