I should probably start with my earliest read - having enjoyed the BBC series back in '99 & having it lodge in my mind ever since, it was therefore a joy to delve into the original text of The Scarlet Pimpernel - something I'd been meaning to read ever since.
Figes, on the other hand, I'd packed into my bag to take home at Christmas but didn't get so far in my reading of it. That one's next up for sure.
Because what do I really want to write & talk about?
The Goldfinch.
Oh my. ★★★★★
I actually checked this novel out of the library in error; what had been recommended to me by a friend was The Luminaries. No matter; as far as mistakes go, this was an excellent one to have made.
For me, the Observer says it best.
"A modern epic." - BOOKS OF THE YEAR
Absolutely.
I want to use the word, sprawling. That word often comes with negative connotations though: messy, overcooked, disordered. That's not my meaning here. Sprawling across the globe, The Goldfinch takes us from Amsterdam to New York to Las Vegas & back again.
Epic in its reach & steady with its pacing, Tartt details the daily life, the mundane & the domestic to such a point that the reader becomes so drawn into Theo Decker's present day, we forget that we've forgotten about what happened with the painting.
Las Vegas, as a section of the novel, was brilliant in my mind at doing this, unwrapping more layers of the relationship between Theo & Boris.
What else?
- Having not paid much heed to the blurb, my genuine suspense & shock at Theo's mother's death ... I knew something was coming but was waiting for it from the sidewalk to the museum. (A bit like when I first read Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Froerr but forgot to clock it was situated in the aftermath of 9/11.)
- Not seeking to translate the Dutch until about four-fifths of the way in
- Bereavement & grief; Theo dealing with PTSD & his dysfunctional father
- Society circles: Mrs Barbour / Hobie / the art world's elite
- The intricacies of woodwork & restoration & Hobie's love of his trade
- Theo's escape & successful bus ride with Popper. (Hurrah!)
- My despair at Theo's return to errant ways in embezzlement
... & this despite Tartt's warning to the reader as he bids Boris goodbye
- My gasp at Kitsey's betrayal of her fiancee & with whom (!)
- The state of play in Theo's unrequited love for Pippa
- Theo's identity wrapped in that of his possession & his secret
- Boris' unexpected, gallant action at the close
“Worse: the thought of returning to any kind of normal routine seemed disloyal, wrong. It kept being a shock every time I remembered it, a fresh slap: she was gone. Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.”
.........
"The twilights out there were florid & melodramatic, great sweeps of orange & crimson & Lawrence-in-the-desert vermillion .... I floated on my back, trying to pick out constellations I knew in the confusing white spatter of stars... all the friendly childhood patterns that had twinkled me to sleep from the glow-in-the-dark planetarium stars on my bedroom ceiling back in New York. Now, transfigured - cold & glorious like deities with their disguises fling off - it was as if they'd flown through the roof into the sky to assume their true, celestial homes." [260]
....
Homecoming & return:
"The streets were much louder than I remembered - smellier, too. Standing on the corner by A La Virile Russie I found myself overpowered with the familiar old Midtown stench: carriage horses, bus exhaust, perfume, and urine. For so long I'd thought of Vegas as something temporary - my real life was New York - but was it? Not any more, I thought, dismally..." [409]
.....
"Not this woman."
Boris laughed. "Well, you have found a good one, then! A rare one! Is she beautiful?"
"Yes."
"Rich?"
"Yes."
"Intelligent?"
"Most people would say so, yes."
"Heartless?"
"A bit."
Boris laughed. "And you love her, yes. But not too much."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because you are not mad, or wild, or grieving! You are not roaring out to choke her with your own bare hands! Which means your soul is not too mixed up with hers. And that is good. Here is my experience. Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you. What you want is to live & be happy in the world is a woman who has her own life & lets you have yours." [667]
____________
xxv.
ALL DAY, I WAS practically out-of-body with excitement at the thought of the evening ahead. Downstairs, in the store (where I was too busy with Christmas customers to devote undivided attention to my plans), I thought about what I would wear (something casual, not a suit, nothing too studied) and where I would take her to dinner—nothing too fancy, nothing that would put her on guard or seem self-conscious on my part but really special all the same, special and charming and quiet enough for us to talk and not too terribly far from Film Forum—besides which, she’d been out of the city for a while, she’d probably enjoy going someplace new (“Oh, this little place? yeah, it’s great, glad you like it, a real find”) but apart from all the above (and quiet was the main thing, more than food or location, I didn’t want to be anyplace where we were going to have to yell) it was going to have to be someplace I could get us in at short notice—and then too, there was the vegetarian issue. Someplace adorable. Not too expensive to raise alarms. It couldn’t look as if I was going to too much trouble; it had to seem thoughtless, unplanned. [680]
ON THE WAY OVER, I couldn’t help humming and smiling. And when I turned the corner and spotted her standing out in front of the theater I was so nervous I had to stop and compose myself for a moment before rushing in to greet her, helping her with her bags (she, laden with shopping, babbling about her day), perfect, perfect bliss of standing in line with her, huddling close because it was cold, and then inside, the red carpet and the whole evening ahead of us, clapping her gloved hands together: “oh, do you want some popcorn?” “Sure!” (me springing to the counter) “Popcorn’s great here—” and then, walking into the theater together, me touching her back casually, the velvety back of her coat, perfect brown coat and perfect green hat and perfect, perfect, little red head—“here—aisle? do you like the aisle?” we’d gone to the movies just enough (five times) for me to make careful note of where she liked to sit, plus, I knew it well enough from Hobie after years of inconspicuously questioning him as much as I dared about her tastes, her likes and dislikes, her habits, slipping the questions in casually, one at a time, for almost a decade, does she like this, does she like that; and there she was, turning and smiling at me, at me! and there were way too many people in the theater because it was the seven o’clock show, way more people than I was comfortable with given my generalized anxiety and hatred of crowded places, and more people trickling in even after the film had already started but I didn’t care, it could have been a foxhole in the Somme being shelled by the Germans and all that mattered was her next to me in the dark, her arm beside mine. And the music! Glenn Gould at the piano, wild-haired, ebullient, head thrown back, emissary from the realm of angels, rapt and consumed by the sublime! I kept stealing looks at her, unable to help myself; but it was at least half an hour in before I had the nerve to turn and look at her full-on—profile washed white in the glow from the screen—and realized, to my horror, that she wasn’t enjoying the film. She was bored. No: she was upset. [682]
.............
xxviii.
SOMEHOW—AS IF BY pre-arrangement of the gods—the half-empty wine bar we’d ducked into, on impulse, was warm and golden and candle-lit and much, much better than any of the restaurants I’d planned for.
Tiny table. My knee to her knee—was she aware of it? Quite as aware as I was? Bloom of the candle flame on her face, flame glinting metallic in her hair, hair so bright it looked about to catch fire. Everything blazing, everything sweet. They were playing old Bob Dylan, more than perfect for narrow Village streets close to Christmas and the snow whirling down in big feathery flakes, the kind of winter where you want to be walking down a city street with your arm around a girl like on the old record cover—because Pippa was exactly that girl, not the prettiest, but the no-makeup and kind of ordinary-looking girl he’d chosen to be happy with, and in fact that picture was an ideal of happiness in its way, the hike of his shoulders and the slightly embarrassed quality of her smile, that open-ended look like they might just wander off anywhere they wanted together, and—there she was! her! and she was talking about herself, affectionate and old-shoe, asking me about Hobie and the shop and my spirits and what I was reading and what I was listening to, lots and lots of questions but seeming anxious to share her life with me too, her chilly flat expensive to heat, depressing light and damp stale smell, cheap clothes on the high street and so many American chains in London now it’s like a shopping mall, and what meds are you on and what meds am I on (we both had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a malady that in Europe had different initials, it seemed, and got you sent to a hospital for Army vets if you weren’t careful); her tiny garden, which she shared with half a dozen people, and the batty Englishwoman who’d filled it with ailing tortoises she’d smuggled from the south of France (“they all die, of cold and malnutrition—it’s really cruel—she doesn’t feed them properly, crumbled bread, can you imagine, I buy them turtle food at the pet store without telling her”)—and how terribly she wanted a dog, but of course it was hard in London with the quarantine which they had in Switzerland too, how did she always end up living in all these dog-unfriendly places? and wow, I looked better than she’d seen me in years, she’d missed me, missed the hell out of me, what an amazing evening—and we’d been there for hours, laughing over little things but being serious too, very grave, she being both generous and receptive (this was another thing about her; she listened, her attention was dazzling—I never had the feeling that other people listened to me half as closely; I felt like a different person in her company, a better one, could say things to her I couldn’t say to anyone else, certainly not Kitsey, who had a brittle way of deflating serious comments by making a joke, or switching to another topic, or interrupting, or sometimes just pretending not to hear), and it was an utter delight to be with her, I loved her every minute of every day, heart and mind and soul and all of it, and it was getting late and I wanted the place never to close, never.
“No no,” she was saying, running a finger around the rim of her wine glass—the shape of her hands moved me intensely, Welty’s signet on her forefinger, I could stare at her hands the way I could never stare at her face without seeming like a creep. “I loved the movie, actually. And the music—” she laughed, and the laugh, for me, had all the joy of the music behind it. “Knocked the breath out of me. Welty saw him play once, at Carnegie. One of the great nights of his life, he said. It’s just—”
“Yes?” The smell of her wine. Red-wine stain on her mouth. This was one of the great nights of my life.
___________
“I felt like a lifetime had come and gone since my night with Pippa and I thought how happy I'd been, rushing to meet her in the sharp-edged winter darkness, my elation at spotting her under a streetlamp out in front of Film Forum and how I'd stood on the corner to savor it - the joy of watching her watch for me. Her expectant watching-the-crowd face. Me she was watching for: me. And the heart-shock of believing, for only a moment, that you might just have what could never be yours.”
__________
Lighting out West:
"When will you be back?"
"Oh, soon," I said, not very convincingly. I would have been happy to walk out of that room & keep walking for days & months until I was on some beach in Mexico maybe, some isolated shore where I could wander alone & wear the same clothes till they rotted off me & be the crazy gringo in the horn rimmed glasses who repaired chairs & tables for a living. [715]
