"Because Between 'Reality' On The One Hand, And The Point Where The Mind Strikes Reality, There's A Middle Zone, A Rainbow Edge Where Beauty Comes Into Being, Where Two Very Different Surfaces Mingle And Blur To Provide What Life Does Not: And This Is The Space Where All Art Exists, And All Magic"

Suffice it to say that Donna Tartt is quite a remarkable writer. I found the story of The Goldfinch so remarkable and was completely hooked from the very beginning but combined with her equisite descriptions and aside observations of life (filtered through a oftentimes dark and troubled narrator), I just could not put it down. As I noted a couple posts ago, there were many pages that I dog-eared because a particular passage would capture me and I would be so struck with the words and thoughts behind them. I believe I even read one of them outloud to the bf. That doesn't happen very often at all because he never really seems all that impressed with them in spite of how much I love them.

The Goldfinch tells the story of Theo Decker, who we meet as a young 13-year old, living in NYC with his mother, following their abandonment by his alcoholic father. After getting in trouble at school and having to go meet the principal with his mom, they make a stop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on their way to kill time and because his mother is particularly keen to see a favorite painting of hers. During this sojurn, the museum is vicitim to a terrorist attack, with Theo being one of the few survivors near the center of the blast. He emerges, having connected briefly with a dying man in the museum who insists that he take a painting with him, The Goldfinch, by Carel Fabritius, which Theo does, in his incoherent state of shock and delusion. 

From here, Theo's life trails down a difficult path, initially being sympathetically taken in by the wealthy family of one of his friends from childhood. But his father returns to claim him (and the possibility of any money he can get his hands on through Theo) and Theo moves to Las Vegas where he befriends Boris, the son of a Russian business man who travels the world. Together, they head into a self-destructive path, fueled with drugs and alcohol, but at the same time, cement their friendship. 

Further into his adulthood, Theo continues his darkness, but has established himself as a very sucessful antiques dealer, after connecting with the family of the dying man he met in the museum. All the while, he is tortured over the loss of his mother, the trauma he experienced in the museum, his unrequited love for another survivor of the bombing, and the fear of hiding The Goldfinch, which by now, the musuem curators and authorities are certain was stolen from the museum and not destroyed in the bombing. What unfolds is a sinister and dangerous situation for Theo, who is perhaps too troubled a soul to really be able to handle a sinister and dangerous situation. 

AT 771 pages, this book was dense, but each different vignette of Theo's life (from his time as a young kid before, during, and after the bombing, to his wild and unsupervised time in Las Vegas staying with his father and meeting Boris, to his time as an adult where he is learning to navigate the life that has been thrust upon him) was told with so much riveting detail, that I couldn't possibly see it being any shorter. I actually loved the fact that it was so lush and long because it helped you GET Theo and everything about him and his circumstances and what drove him to the choices that he made. 

And again, I was so remarkably captured by so many passages:

"You see one painting, I see another, the art book puts it at another remove still, the lady buying the greeting card at the museum gift shop sees something else enitre, and that's not even to mention the people separated from us by time -- four hundred years before us, four hundred after we're gone --it'll never strike anybody the same way and the great majority of people it'll never strike in any deep way at all but -- a really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular. Yours, yours. I was painted for you." 

"What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?"

"And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beutiful 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." 

I mean c'mon, that last sentence? It's just freaking beautiful. 

Donna Tartt just shot to the top of my list of authors that I want to read everything they wrote. And it's possible that I bought her other 2 novels for that very reason. 

Side note about the movie of The Goldfinch: as I was reading the book, I was aware of the fact that the movie had already been made of the novel. And I found myself already angry about it. Because there is SO MUCH in the book that I was angry that they short-changed it by making it a 2.5 hour, single-sitting movie. It needed to be done as a miniseries, in the style of Big Little Lies. Devote the time, space, and development to explore all of the amazing facets of the novel. So when I watched the movie, while I was pleased that they kept as true to the book as possible and really included much more than I expected, it was all so rushed. It didn't develop anything nearly enough, and you didn't have the sympathy or understanding of Theo (or any of the other characters for that matter) the way you needed to. So while I would give the movie maybe a B-/C+, I don't think many people who didn't read the book would remotely appreciate it, which does a huge disservice to the book. 

So yeah, go read this book, I promise you won't be disappointed!

Given that life has substantially changed in the last couple weeks to a world of pandemic quarantine where we'll be staying home indefinitely, I anticipate my reading will ramp up quite a bit here. And hopefully my commitment to writing here too. I mean, what the hell else do I have to do? I'm being given the gift of time, so in order to avoid a deadly infectious disease, I think I can commit to just huddling up and doing nothing but read. With that said, Dorothy Parker is an absolute delight. But I sometimes struggle with reading books of short stories...I feel as though I have to only read a couple at a time to then reflect and absorb the individual story. If I were to sit down and read it cover to cover, I would never appreciate each story, the tone of them (particularly with Dorothy Parker) would begin to feel monotonous, and I would probably forget most of what I read. So I'm trying to pace myself a little bit with Ms. Parker. But wow, what a wit. And boy will I have commentary about her portrayal of men and women in her stories. 

So with that, back t0 staring at these 4 walls and finding the many constructive things to do. Happy quarantine Saturday.