The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt, 2013
Contemporary fiction Literary fictionMystery, thriller & crime
A boy walks out of a museum bombing with a small Dutch painting, and it quietly shapes the next thirty years of his life.
Feels like melancholy, longing and dread. About art, death and identity.
A page from the book
A case for wading straight through the worst of it, eyes open.
That life - whatever else it is - is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch. Donna Tartt.Tartt writes her novels in longhand and took about eleven years over this one; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2014.
Books that feel like this
More by Donna Tartt
The Secret History
Donna Tartt, 1992
A California scholarship boy is taken up by a circle of Greek students at an elite Vermont college — and by the thing they have done. A novel about beauty, envy and the cost of belonging.
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Questions readers ask
- What is The Goldfinch like?
- Feels like melancholy, longing and dread. About art, death and identity.
- What should I read after The Goldfinch?
- If you liked The Goldfinch, try Circe (Madeline Miller), Girl with a Pearl Earring (Tracy Chevalier) and Us Against You (Fredrik Backman).
A taste of the feed
How much of what we call delicacy is really other people's carelessness?
It is a common saying that women are delicate creatures, flowers, eggs, anything that may be crushed in a moment’s carelessness. If I had ever believed it, I no longer did.
Circe · Madeline Miller
The child who can't invent monsters grows up to look very closely at real things.
Frans, Agnes, and I used to sit along that canal and throw things in—pebbles, sticks, once a broken tile—and imagine what they might touch on the bottom—not fish, but creatures from our imagination, with many eyes, scales, hands and fins. Frans thought up the most interesting monsters. Agnes was the most frightened. I always stopped the game, too inclined to see things as they were to be able to think up things that were not.
Girl with a Pearl Earring · Tracy Chevalier
The dark is a different thing depending on who you are.
They run only where there are lights. They don’t say anything but are both thinking the same thing: guys never think about light, it just isn’t a problem in their lives. When guys are scared of the dark, they’re scared of ghosts and monsters, but when girls are scared of the dark, they’re scared of guys.
Us Against You · Fredrik Backman
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