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The Goldfinch: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction) Hardcover – October 22, 2013
| Donna Tartt (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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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 is a mesmerizing, stay-up-all-night and tell-all-your-friends triumph, an old-fashioned story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention. From the streets of New York to the dark corners of the art underworld, this "soaring masterpiece" examines the devastating impact of grief and the ruthless machinations of fate (Ron Charles, Washington Post).
- Print length775 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherLittle, Brown and Company
- Publication dateOctober 22, 2013
- Dimensions6.55 x 1.9 x 9.65 inches
- ISBN-109780316055437
- ISBN-13978-0316055437
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"The Goldfinch is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind....Donna Tartt has delivered an extraordinary work of fiction."―Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review
"The Goldfinch is a book about art in all its forms, and right from the start we remember why we enjoy Donna Tartt so much: the humming plot and elegant prose; the living, breathing characters; the perfectly captured settings....Joy and sorrow exist in the same breath, and by the end The Goldfinch hangs in our stolen heart."―Vanity Fair
"A long-awaited, elegant meditation on love, memory, and the haunting power of art....Eloquent and assured, with memorable characters....A standout-and well-worth the wait."―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"It's a classic...If you haven't read it, read it. If you have, read it again."―Andy Cohen, Today Show
"Where to begin? Simply put, I'm indescribably jealous of any reader picking up this masterpiece for the first time. And once they do, they will long remember the heartrending character of Theo Decker and his unthinkable journey."―Sarah Jessica Parker for Goop
"A soaring masterpiece."―Ron Charles, Washington Post
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Goldfinch
By Donna TarttLittle, Brown and Company
Copyright © 2013 Donna TarttAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-316-05543-7
CHAPTER 1
Boy with a Skull
i.
While I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time inyears. I'd been shut up in my hotel for more than a week, afraid to telephoneanybody or go out; and my heart scrambled and floundered at even the mostinnocent noises: elevator bell, rattle of the minibar cart, even church clockstolling the hour, de Westertoren, Krijtberg, a dark edge to the clangor, aninwrought fairy-tale sense of doom. By day I sat on the foot of the bedstraining to puzzle out the Dutch-language news on television (which washopeless, since I knew not a word of Dutch) and when I gave up, I sat by thewindow staring out at the canal with my camel's-hair coat thrown over myclothes—for I'd left New York in a hurry and the things I'd brought weren't warmenough, even indoors.
Outside, all was activity and cheer. It was Christmas, lights twinkling on thecanal bridges at night; red-cheeked dames en heren, scarves flying inthe icy wind, clattered down the cobblestones with Christmas trees lashed to thebacks of their bicycles. In the afternoons, an amateur band played Christmascarols that hung tinny and fragile in the winter air.
Chaotic room-service trays; too many cigarettes; lukewarm vodka from duty free.During those restless, shut-up days, I got to know every inch of the room as aprisoner comes to know his cell. It was my first time in Amsterdam; I'd seenalmost nothing of the city and yet the room itself, in its bleak, drafty,sunscrubbed beauty, gave a keen sense of Northern Europe, a model of theNetherlands in miniature: whitewash and Protestant probity, co-mingled withdeep-dyed luxury brought in merchant ships from the East. I spent anunreasonable amount of time scrutinizing a tiny pair of gilt-framed oils hangingover the bureau, one of peasants skating on an ice-pond by a church, the other asailboat flouncing on a choppy winter sea: decorative copies, nothing special,though I studied them as if they held, encrypted, some key to the secret heartof the old Flemish masters. Outside, sleet tapped at the windowpanes anddrizzled over the canal; and though the brocades were rich and the carpet wassoft, still the winter light carried a chilly tone of 1943, privation andausterities, weak tea without sugar and hungry to bed.
Early every morning while it was still black out, before the extra clerks cameon duty and the lobby started filling up, I walked downstairs for thenewspapers. The hotel staff moved with hushed voices and quiet footsteps, eyesgliding across me coolly as if they didn't quite see me, the American man in 27who never came down during the day; and I tried to reassure myself that thenight manager (dark suit, crew cut, horn-rimmed glasses) would probably go tosome lengths to avert trouble or avoid a fuss.
The Herald Tribune had no news of my predicament but the story was allover the Dutch papers, dense blocks of foreign print which hung, tantalizingly,just beyond the reach of my comprehension. Onopgeloste moord. Onbekende.I went upstairs and got back into bed (fully clad, because the room was so cold)and spread the papers out on the coverlet: photographs of police cars, crimescene tape, even the captions were impossible to decipher, and although theydidn't appear to have my name, there was no way to know if they had adescription of me or if they were withholding information from the public.
The room. The radiator. Een Amerikaan met een strafblad. Olive greenwater of the canal.
Because I was cold and ill, and much of the time at a loss what to do (I'dneglected to bring a book, as well as warm clothes), I stayed in bed most of theday. Night seemed to fall in the middle of the afternoon. Often—amidst thecrackle of strewn newspapers—I drifted in and out of sleep, and my dreams forthe most part were muddied with the same indeterminate anxiety that bled throughinto my waking hours: court cases, luggage burst open on the tarmac with myclothes scattered everywhere and endless airport corridors where I ran forplanes I knew I'd never make.
Thanks to my fever I had a lot of weird and extremely vivid dreams, sweats whereI thrashed around hardly knowing if it was day or night, but on the last andworst of these nights I dreamed about my mother: a quick, mysterious dream thatfelt more like a visitation. I was in Hobie's shop—or, more accurately, somehaunted dream space staged like a sketchy version of the shop—when she came upsuddenly behind me so I saw her reflection in a mirror. At the sight of her Iwas paralyzed with happiness; it was her, down to the most minute detail, thevery pattern of her freckles, she was smiling at me, more beautiful and yet notolder, black hair and funny upward quirk of her mouth, not a dream but apresence that filled the whole room: a force all her own, a living otherness.And as much as I wanted to, I knew I couldn't turn around, that to look at herdirectly was to violate the laws of her world and mine; she had come to me theonly way she could, and our eyes met in the glass for a long still moment; butjust as she seemed about to speak—with what seemed a combination of amusement,affection, exasperation—a vapor rolled between us and I woke up.
ii.
Things would have turned out better if she had lived. As it was, she died when Iwas a kid; and though everything that's happened to me since then is thoroughlymy own fault, still when I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might haveled me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life.
Her death the dividing mark: Before and After. And though it's a bleak thing toadmit all these years later, still I've never met anyone who made me feel lovedthe way she did. Everything came alive in her company; she cast a charmedtheatrical light about her so that to see anything through her eyes was to seeit in brighter colors than ordinary—I remember a few weeks before she died,eating a late supper with her in an Italian restaurant down in the Village, andhow she grasped my sleeve at the sudden, almost painful loveliness of a birthdaycake with lit candles being carried in procession from the kitchen, faint circleof light wavering in across the dark ceiling and then the cake set down to blazeamidst the family, beatifying an old lady's face, smiles all round, waitersstepping away with their hands behind their backs—just an ordinary birthdaydinner you might see anywhere in an inexpensive downtown restaurant, and I'msure I wouldn't even remember it had she not died so soon after, but I thoughtabout it again and again after her death and indeed I'll probably think about itall my life: that candlelit circle, a tableau vivant of the daily, commonplacehappiness that was lost when I lost her.
She was beautiful, too. That's almost secondary; but still, she was. When shecame to New York fresh from Kansas, she worked part-time as a model though shewas too uneasy in front of the camera to be very good at it; whatever she had,it didn't translate to film.
And yet she was wholly herself: a rarity. I cannot recall ever seeing anotherperson who really resembled her. She had black hair, fair skin that freckled insummer, china-blue eyes with a lot of light in them; and in the slant of hercheekbones there was such an eccentric mixture of the tribal and the CelticTwilight that sometimes people guessed she was Icelandic. In fact, she was halfIrish, half Cherokee, from a town in Kansas near the Oklahoma border; and sheliked to make me laugh by calling herself an Okie even though she was as glossyand nervy and stylish as a racehorse. That exotic character unfortunately comesout a little too stark and unforgiving in photographs—her freckles covered withmakeup, her hair pulled back in a ponytail at the nape of her neck like somenobleman in The Tale of Genji—and what doesn't come across at all is herwarmth, her merry, unpredictable quality, which is what I loved about her most.It's clear, from the stillness she emanates in pictures, how much she mistrustedthe camera; she gives off a watchful, tigerish air of steeling herself againstattack. But in life she wasn't like that. She moved with a thrilling quickness,gestures sudden and light, always perched on the edge of her chair like somelong elegant marsh-bird about to startle and fly away. I loved the sandalwoodperfume she wore, rough and unexpected, and I loved the rustle of her starchedshirt when she swooped down to kiss me on the forehead. And her laugh was enoughto make you want to kick over what you were doing and follow her down thestreet. Wherever she went, men looked at her out of the corner of their eyes,and sometimes they used to look at her in a way that bothered me a little.
Her death was my fault. Other people have always been a little too quick toassure me that it wasn't; and yes, only a kid, who could have known,terrible accident, rotten luck, could have happened to anyone, it's allperfectly true and I don't believe a word of it.
It happened in New York, April 10th, fourteen years ago. (Even my hand balks atthe date; I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on thepaper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary day but now it sticks up on thecalendar like a rusty nail.)
If the day had gone as planned, it would have faded into the sky unmarked,swallowed without a trace along with the rest of my eighth-grade year. Whatwould I remember of it now? Little or nothing. But of course the texture of thatmorning is clearer than the present, down to the drenched, wet feel of the air.It had rained in the night, a terrible storm, shops were flooded and a couple ofsubway stations closed; and the two of us were standing on the squelching carpetoutside our apartment building while her favorite doorman, Goldie, who adoredher, walked backwards down Fifty-Seventh with his arm up, whistling for a taxi.Cars whooshed by in sheets of dirty spray; rain-swollen clouds tumbled highabove the skyscrapers, blowing and shifting to patches of clear blue sky, anddown below, on the street, beneath the exhaust fumes, the wind felt damp andsoft like spring.
"Ah, he's full, my lady," Goldie called over the roar of the street, steppingout of the way as a taxi splashed round the corner and shut its light off. Hewas the smallest of the doormen: a wan, thin, lively little guy, light-skinnedPuerto Rican, a former featherweight boxer. Though he was pouchy in the facefrom drinking (sometimes he turned up on the night shift smelling of J&B), stillhe was wiry and muscular and quick—always kidding around, always having acigarette break on the corner, shifting from foot to foot and blowing on hiswhite-gloved hands when it was cold, telling jokes in Spanish and cracking theother doormen up.
"You in a big hurry this morning?" he asked my mother. His nametag said BURT D.but everyone called him Goldie because of his gold tooth and because his lastname, de Oro, meant "gold" in Spanish.
"No, plenty of time, we're fine." But she looked exhausted and her hands wereshaky as she re-tied her scarf, which snapped and fluttered in the wind.
Goldie must have noticed this himself, because he glanced over at me (backed upevasively against the concrete planter in front of the building, lookinganywhere but at her) with an air of slight disapproval.
"You're not taking the train?" he said to me.
"Oh, we've got some errands," said my mother, without much conviction, when sherealized I didn't know what to say. Normally I didn't pay much attention to herclothes, but what she had on that morning (white trenchcoat, filmy pink scarf,black and white two-tone loafers) is so firmly burned into my memory that nowit's difficult for me to remember her any other way.
I was thirteen. I hate to remember how awkward we were with each other that lastmorning, stiff enough for the doorman to notice; any other time we would havebeen talking companionably enough, but that morning we didn't have much to sayto each other because I'd been suspended from school. They'd called her at heroffice the day before; she'd come home silent and furious; and the awful thingwas that I didn't even know what I'd been suspended for, although I was aboutseventy-five percent sure that Mr. Beeman (en route from his office to theteachers' lounge) had looked out the window of the second-floor landing atexactly the wrong moment and seen me smoking on school property. (Or, rather,seen me standing around with Tom Cable while he smoked, which at myschool amounted to practically the same offense.) My mother hated smoking. Herparents—whom I loved hearing stories about, and who had unfairly died before I'dhad the chance to know them—had been affable horse trainers who travelled aroundthe west and raised Morgan horses for a living: cocktail-drinking, canasta-playing livelies who went to the Kentucky Derby every year and kept cigarettesin silver boxes around the house. Then my grandmother doubled over and startedcoughing blood one day when she came in from the stables; and for the rest of mymother's teenage years, there had been oxygen tanks on the front porch andbedroom shades that stayed pulled down.
But—as I feared, and not without reason—Tom's cigarette was only the tip of theiceberg. I'd been in trouble at school for a while. It had all started, or begunto snowball rather, when my father had run off and left my mother and me somemonths before; we'd never liked him much, and my mother and I were generallymuch happier without him, but other people seemed shocked and distressed at theabrupt way he'd abandoned us (without money, child support, or forwardingaddress), and the teachers at my school on the Upper West Side had been so sorryfor me, so eager to extend their understanding and support, that they'd givenme—a scholarship student—all sorts of special allowances and delayed deadlinesand second and third chances: feeding out the rope, over a matter of months,until I'd managed to lower myself into a very deep hole.
So the two of us—my mother and I—had been called in for a conference at school.The meeting wasn't until eleven-thirty but since my mother had been forced totake the morning off, we were heading to the West Side early—for breakfast (and,I expected, a serious talk) and so she could buy a birthday present for someoneshe worked with. She'd been up until two-thirty the night before, her face tensein the glow of the computer, writing emails and trying to clear the decks forher morning out of the office.
"I don't know about you," Goldie was saying to my mother, rather fiercely, "butI say enough with all this spring and damp already. Rain, rain—" He shivered,pulled his collar closer in pantomime and glanced at the sky.
"I think it's supposed to clear up this afternoon."
"Yeah, I know, but I'm ready for summer." Rubbing his hands. "Peopleleave town, they hate it, complain about the heat, but me—I'm a tropical bird.Hotter the better. Bring it on!" Clapping, backing on his heels down the street."And—tell you what I love the best, is how it quietens out here, come July—?building all empty and sleepy, everyone away, you know?" Snapping his fingers,cab speeding by. "That's my vacation."
"But don't you burn up out here?" My standoffish dad had hated this about her—hertendency to engage in conversation with waitresses, doormen, the wheezy oldguys at the dry cleaner's. "I mean, in winter, at least you can put on an extracoat—"
"Listen, you're working the door in winter? I'm telling you it getscold. I don't care how many coats and hats you put on. You're standingout here, in January, February, and the wind is blowing in off the river?Brrr."
(Continues...)Excerpted from The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. Copyright © 2013 Donna Tartt. Excerpted by permission of Little, Brown and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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Product details
- ASIN : 0316055433
- Publisher : Little, Brown and Company; 1st edition (October 22, 2013)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 775 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780316055437
- ISBN-13 : 978-0316055437
- Item Weight : 2.4 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.55 x 1.9 x 9.65 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #12,677 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Donna Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, and is a graduate of Bennington College. She is the author of the novels The Secret History, The Little Friend, and The Goldfinch, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2014.
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So I sat there, my mind designing this foster of a thought while I laid comfortably on the grey, semi-soft couch I bought once on sale on a Tuesday evening at a Rooms-to-Go, realizing that my life had taken a turn for, quite possibly, the worst, and wondering if I would ever reach the long-crying light at the end of the tunnel that is this pretentious book.
See- that was MISERABLE to read. Don't do that. I'm sorry I did that. You've actually got to get to the point sometimes. Plus, I got halfway through and I felt as if nothing happened. I understand that this is a "realistic" book and may even be an eye-opener for some, but I just found the story profoundly boring, or dare I say it, lame. She could have composed a much more compelling story with such an interesting background and plot. After all, it is the plot that attracted us all in the first place, isn't it? I'm sorry to say that this book is overrated and like I said, pretentious.
The writing is superb, cannot understand the complaints, this is literature at it's best. It's not meant to be a fast read, take it slowly, yes it's a long book, so what, it's virtually three books for the price of one. It's a hard story, showing us that the affects of terrorism on those that are involved and those that lose loved ones. It also opens our minds to the fact that there is both good and evil in all of us and cowardice and bravery. The characters in the story are the best portrayals that I have read for years. Miss Tartt doesn't churn books out one after the other as so many authors, they are gems, to be read and not forgotten. I sincerely hope that this becomes a modern classic because it certainly deserves it.
Top reviews from other countries
To paraphrase Kingsley Amis on his son's writing style, there need to be more sentences like, "They finished their drinks and left the room." In this case, "I took the lift to the seventh floor" would (more than) suffice. This overly writerly prose is just too much for me, and it felt as if the book were being padded for length. So I finish my drink and leave the room.
A modern story which starts minutely detailed and vividly seen by the author, so we see it too, the nuances of the Barbour family life, parents and four children, of whom Andy is Theo’s friend, a “white mouse” with a “wan, irritating voice” who has a hilarious line of repartee with his father who is eternally trying to interest his indifferent children in sailing.
Other stand-out characters are Hobie who befriends Theo, and Boris, Theo’s wild, unpredictable friend who runs wild with him in Las Vegas. A few sentences and we have them, a real person, fixed, Mr Silver the debt collector, the doormen.
If only the book had been a quarter or even a third shorter. After the words “eight years later” things change, as if the author is tired of her creations and gallops through the rest, impossibly convoluted and contrived plot and all the Dickensian/J K Rowling characters we have come to love becoming caricatures, less true and solid. Pippa, always vague, slips away completely, and even Boris’s English, so funny to start with, become cartoon-like.
There are themes and metaphors bursting out all over, meandering, fathers and sons, abandonment, the pointlessness or otherwise of life struggles etc etc, and of course acres about ART and the meaning of the painting of the goldfinch, which is, after all, a painting of a bird chained up.












