Book Synopsis:
The novel is a coming-of-age tale told in the first person. The protagonist, 13-year-old Theodore Decker, survives a terrorist bombing at an art museum where his mother is killed. While staggering through the debris, he takes with him a small Dutch Golden Age painting called The Goldfinch. 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 his unbearable longing for his mother, he clings to one thing that reminds him of her: the small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art.
The painting is one of the few surviving works by Rembrandt's most promising pupil, Carel Fabritius (almost all of Fabritius's works were destroyed in the Delft explosion of 1654, in which the artist himself was killed).
Book Review:
Critical reception of the novel was polarized. Early on, the trade publications Kirkus Reviews and Booklist both gave the novel "starred" reviews.[4] Booklist wrote, "Drenched in sensory detail, infused with Theo's churning thoughts and feelings, sparked by nimble dialogue, and propelled by escalating cosmic angst and thriller action, Tartt's trenchant, defiant, engrossing, and rocketing novel conducts a grand inquiry into the mystery and sorrow of survival, beauty and obsession, and the promise of art."
Stephen King praised the novel and called Tartt "an amazingly good writer." In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani pointed out what she saw as the novel's Dickensian elements, writing, "Ms. Tartt has made Fabritius's bird the MacGuffin at the center of her glorious, Dickensian novel, a novel that pulls together all her remarkable storytelling talents into a rapturous, symphonic whole and reminds the reader of the immersive, stay-up-all-night pleasures of reading."[7] Woody Brown, writing in Art Voice, described The Goldfinch as a "marvelous, epic tale, one whose 773 beautiful pages say, in short: 'How can we? And yet, we do.'"
In mid-2014, Vanity Fair reported that the book had "some of the severest pans in memory from the country's most important critics and sparked a full-on debate in which the naysayers believe that nothing less is at stake than the future of reading itself." Both The New Yorker's James Wood and the London Review of Books claimed the book was juvenile in nature, the former arguing that the novel's "tone, language, and story belong in children's literature" while the latter called The Goldfinch a "children's book" for adults. The Sunday Times of London said that "no amount of straining for high-flown uplift can disguise the fact that The Goldfinch is a turkey", and The Paris Review stated, "A book like The Goldfinch doesn't undo any clichés—it deals in them."
Comentários