The Goldfinch. Review on The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt

This is a review on the book The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt which I just finished reading. If you are a bookworm, and you have the time, as the book is almost 800 pages, then you should make it a point to read this wonderful work.

In The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt has a 50-page two-part opening. In a section, the narrator of the story, Theo Decker, is staying in a hotel in Amsterdam, looking at dutch newspapers; he is searching for his name in articles illustrated with pictures of police cars and crime scenes.

Before any explanation is given as to why he is doing this, the story moves back 14 years to New York and the day of his mother's death. Her death takes place in New York's Metropolitan Museum, due to a bomb explosion – he and his mother are in separate rooms when the bomb blast occurs, and the descriptions of Theo regaining consciousness in the wreckage, and trying to find his way out of the museum before returning home, expecting to find his mother there, is very intense.

At this point the novel changes its approach and, for a while, is primarily involved with showing us the dislocation of Theo's life – both physical and emotional. His mother dead, his father long gone, he finds himself living with the family of a school friend; this is understood by everyone to be a short-term option, until his father reappears, with his girlfriend Xandra, and takes Theo to live with him in Las Vegas.

There will be more twists and turns in this tale of a motherless boy whose life involves dramatic changes and is filled with a vast cast of characters, many of whose affections and intentions are not easy to work out.There is a girl called Pippa, near Theo in age, who was also in the museum when the bomb exploded, and is the only person who Theo feels can understand his problems.

But there is another to the novel, this one with instances of Crime and Punishment. This bit is of life just before the bomb blast. Young Theo Decker enters a museum with his mother; and he leaves taking a painting with him. The painting – one that really exists – is The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius.

Almost all his work was destroyed in a fire;except a few.The Goldfinch is widely considered the finest of the paintings that survived. Just before the explosion, theo's mother says "Anything we manage to save from history is a miracle, " and that is why he takes the painting.

Picking up the painting from the debris and walking out of the museum with it isn't exactly theft, not if theft involves the conscious decision to steal. Theo is portrayed to be acting in a  state of mental distress.

But once Theo reads in the newspaper that the painting is believed to have been destroyed in the explosion, he chooses to keep quiet about his possession of it – and from here on, he is guilty. As the years go on, both Theo's attachment to the painting(a thing of beauty, but also a physical connection to one of the last conversations he had with his mother) and his guilt over his possession of such a priceless work of art grows.

So, too, does his fear of being imprisoned for stealing the object. It should come as no surprise, in a novel that opens with crime scene tapes and exploding museums, that the story of Theo and the painting is a story of betrayal, suspicion, double-dealing and shoot-outs.

The novel isn't, of course, all action and suspense. Some of its most memorable moments occur in stillness. Take Theo's first experience of the clear desert skies of Las Vegas, after a life spent in the bustling city of new york.

Until now, he has only known the constellations as "childhood patterns that had twinkled me to sleep from the glow-in-the-dark planetarium stars on my bedroom ceiling back in New York. Now, transfigured – cold and glorious like deities with their disguises flung off – it was as if they'd flown through the roof and into the sky to assume their true, celestial homes." It is a glorious piece of prose, but placed within a novel about a boy who has lost his true home – which is, wherever his mother might be – it becomes heart-piercing, too.

The story also contains a lot on theo's friendship with a boy called borris who he meets on the first day of school in las vegas. Borris is sort of a bad influence on him. Then again, it is not entirely right to think of Theo's friendship with Boris as a flaw – the love between the boys is both simple and complicated, in the way of the best friendships. And when Boris re-enters Theo's life in adulthood it is impossible not to hope he is there as a friend, even while fearing the opposite.

Plot and character and fine writing can take you far – but a novel this good makes you want to go even further. The last few pages of the novel take all the serious, big, complicated ideas beneath the surface and hold them up to the light. This is a beautifully written novel and will force you to keep turning the pages without putting the book down. Thank you.