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A Novel
by Donna Tartt
Book Reviewed by:Composed with the skills of a master, The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America; a story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention, and the enormous power of art.
Winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
The author of the classic bestsellers The Secret History and The Little Friend returns with a brilliant, highly anticipated new novel.
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.
Composed with the skills of a master, The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America, and a drama of almost unbearable acuity and power. It is a story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention, and the enormous power of art.
Pulitzer Prize
2014
[The book] could have used some heavy editing. Frankly I am not sure I would have continued on had The Goldfinch not been a Donna Tartt book, knowing she’d spring a sudden surprise on me toward the end. And boy, does she! A dramatic event happens about two-thirds of the way in that upends the very foundations that the story is built on. It upsets, not just Theo, but the reader too, because Tartt has a way of enveloping us completely in her beautifully imagined world. That this plot turn hinges on a slightly far-fetched coincidence, we shall choose to ignore. As I read through, I realized I had impossibly high expectations for the author. The one problem with being Donna Tartt is that you have to measure up to, well, Donna Tartt...continued
Full Review
(970 words)
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(Reviewed by Poornima Apte).
In Donna Tartt's new book, the protagonist, Theo Decker, comes upon an original seventeenth century painting, "The Goldfinch". The painting is one of Carel Fabritius' (Fub-reet-zee-us) most famous works. Fabritius (1622-1654) was one of Rembrandt's pupils. He worked from the Dutch city of Delft and produced only a small body of work before his death in a gunpowder explosion that shook the city in 1654, killing hundreds. Although a student of Rembrandt, Fabritius branched away from his master in his use of cool color schemes and especially his use of perspective - a technique that would surface later in the work of Vermeer.
Fabritius was known to use special optical effects and slight distortions in his paintings. Dutch artists of the ...
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