{"id":10477,"date":"2019-09-28T09:58:41","date_gmt":"2019-09-28T13:58:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=10477"},"modified":"2019-09-28T09:58:41","modified_gmt":"2019-09-28T13:58:41","slug":"the-goldfinch-by-donna-tartt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/the-goldfinch-by-donna-tartt\/","title":{"rendered":"The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the start of The Goldfinch<\/i> I felt slightly annoyed by the narrative voice and writing style\u2014just little things, like the way the narrator says “for I’d left New York in a hurry,” or the way “punch-drunk” is used something like three times in the first hundred pages. But as I kept reading, I was won over, and found myself totally engrossed in the story: despite the book’s length, I read it over the course of eleven days, largely on the subway or on breaks at jury duty; I found myself eagerly looking forward to the next time I’d be able to pick it up. There’s a lot of plot, and it’s hard to write about it without spoilers, but OK: our narrator, Theo, is 13 when his mother dies, in an act of violence that he survives, and which changes the course of his life in multiple ways. There’s a painting (the goldfinch of the title), and an interlude in Las Vegas; there are a lot of drugs; there’s a return to New York City, where Theo grew up; there’s a fevered stay in Amsterdam in late December. There are musings about fate, and chance, and luck, and art, and beauty, and obsession, and loss; there are passages that feel over-written and passages that are just gorgeous. Tartt’s style of description leans heavily on lists, which I personally find really really satisfying, but if you don’t, this is probably not the book for you. I mean, I am all about things like these passages about Amsterdam:<\/p>\n

Outside, all was activity and cheer. It was Christmas, lights twinkling on the canal bridges at night; red-cheeked dames en heren<\/i>, scarves flying in the icy wind, clattered down the cobblestones with Christmas trees lashed to the backs of their bicycles. (5)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

the strangeness of the city pressing in all around me, smells of tobacco and malt and nutmeg, caf\u00e9 walls the melancholy brown of an old leather-bound book and then beyond, dark passages and brackish water lapping, low skies and old buildings all leaning against each other with a moody, poetic, edge-of-destruction feel (649)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Or this, describing someone’s bedroom:<\/p>\n

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 (150)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And oh, I love some of the book’s descriptions of New York places\/moments\/moods because I can picture them so clearly\u2014the park near the subway by Canal Street with the pharmacy across the street, the way the streets feel after a spring rainstorm, what it would be like to step out of a movie at Film Forum and into a world turned white with just-fallen snow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the start of The Goldfinch I felt slightly annoyed by the narrative voice and writing style\u2014just little things, like the way the narrator says “for I’d left New York in a hurry,” or the way “punch-drunk” is used something like three times in the first hundred pages. But as I kept reading, I was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10477\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}