The Goldfinch: Donna Tartt
Jan. 14th, 2015 10:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphilo"If Dickens were alive today..." It's a challenge every novelist in the Anglo-American tradition must have considered at some time or other and here's Donna Tartt rising to it. She takes elements from Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and -especially- Great Expectations, throws them up like spillikins and lets them fall into new and surprising patterns. The Goldfinch is a post 9/11 bildungsroman of Dickensian scope and ambition- set in New York, Las Vegas and Amsterdam- in which cute kid Theo Decker- nicknamed "Potter" (after Harry) by his best friend- slips deeper and deeper into psychic damage and criminality. It deals with class, multiculturalism, drugs, time, love, good and evil- and- self-reflexively, because it is very beautifully written- the power of art to transform and transcend.
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Date: 2015-01-14 10:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-14 10:47 am (UTC)I didn't like The Secret History all that much and I haven't read The Little Friend but I think Tartt has turned herself into a major novelist with this one.
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Date: 2015-01-14 10:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-14 01:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-14 04:58 pm (UTC)