“You need to learn how to walk the world, he told me. There's a lot out there.”

Drown by Junot Díaz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I just finished reading Drown (signed copy, YAY), Junot Díaz's debut short story collection, and have confirmed that he is ever-reliable. In it are 10 stories that revolve around Yunior, the son of an immigrant family and also the protagonist of all Díaz's works. The immigrant experience is anything but smooth, and we see this at all stages of Yunior's life in terms of his family situation, relationships and work life.

Primarily, abuse - mental and physical - never leaves the pages of the book. In the first story, Ysrael, we learn about a boy who was attacked by a pig when he was a baby and thus has a partially deformed face, the reason why he is ostracized and bullied. Abuse, in the form of drug, physical and psychological abuse, is particularly potent in Aurora, in which Yunior and his girlfriend "hurt too well to let it drop." Violence and suffering weave their way into the characters' daily life and stay there. Yet as Yunior says at one point, "I had heart-leather like walruses got blubber." Toughness and machismo are tied to masculine identity.

Yet perhaps heart-leather is what you'll need in order to achieve the goal all immigrants-to-be are after - escape.

Back then I didn't have a clue what she was thinking but now I know what to pencil into all those empty thought bubbles. Escape. Escape.

Yunior's father - as the 'man of the family' - bears the unspoken responsibility to facilitate this escape for his family. Due to this, however, Yunior spends 5 years of his childhood father-less while his Papí goes to New York, works two jobs to support his family, starts a new family, becoming a U.S. citizen through that marriage, and eventually returns, abandoning his aforementioned second family - the second act of abandonment he commits. Abandonment and betrayal run their course throughout the short story collection, denting all relationships.

Despite all the difficulty the characters experience, however, Yunior puts it best when he says,

“Sometimes you just have to try, even if you know it won’t work.”

That is why I love how Ysrael comes back to us in No Face, this time as somebody who can yell FLIGHT, STRENGTH and INVISIBILITY (yes, all in caps) and keep running, still an outcast but at least hoping for a better future. That is also why young Yunior's frequent car rides as a child are terribly poignant - time and time again he is forced to sit in the car and try to not vomit, although time and time again, he does. When one is drowning, the fight for survival becomes desperate gasps for air and a frantic scramble of limbs. Even when "life smacks everybody around," you must still try to get back to the surface.

Drown is not as explosively entertaining as The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao or spot-on witty as This is How You Lose Her, but it puts into words the frustrations, pitfalls and experiences of immigrants in a way that is accessible, memorable and strikingly personal. It's always a pleasure to read anything by Díaz (on a side note, he has a fabulous Facebook page).

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The world is. It just is.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Despite having spent the good part of the last two weeks studying the two world wars for my history mock exams, I decided to dive back into Richard Flanagan's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North the day exams ended. 

Dorrigo Evans, who worked as a surgeon during the construction of the Burma-Thailand railway between 1942 and 1943, is celebrated as a war hero during the post-war years. As a novel about the war, The Narrow Road to the Deep North tells the story of Dorrigo's work as a surgeon, the experiences of the many Australians who were "the slaves of the yellow man," as well as their lives after the war. Since the novel is also a love story, however, another undercurrent runs through it: Dorry's love affair with his uncle's wife, Amy, during the war years.

While the novel does not progress chronologically, the overtones of war are established from the beginning. We start with a moment from Dorry's childhood, when a simple wound foreshadows the blood to be shed later on, just as the brief expletive - "F*ck!" - on page 9 is a mere harbinger of the many more foul words to come as the Australians are dragged into a war that is not theirs. 

I found the most striking element of the novel to be its depiction of war."The Line," evoking an image of ironic simplicity and brutal straightforwardness, is the Japanese railway that millions of prisoners of war were enlisted to help build. To do so,

They went on trudging and falling, they went on stumbling and slipping and swearing as they thought of food, or as they thought of nothing, they went on crawling and shitting and hoping, on and on in a day that had not yet even begun.

Life is reduced to a bare minimum when it becomes "only about getting the next footstep right:" an aim that is at once deceptively simple and infinitely cruel.

The harshness of war is further emphasized through the bestial imagery in the novel. When all vestiges of civilization are stripped away, Choi Sang-min, a Korean guard, "lived like an animal." He "behaved as an animal, he understood as an animal, he thought as an animal. And he understood that such an animal was the only human thing he had ever been allowed to be." Saying that the war turned the prisoners into "a strange animal, a single organism," Flanagan also stresses the sense of solidarity - for survival - that comes with war. 

Another comparison between the POWs and animals is drawn in the novel, but to more tragic effect: like the fish in Mr. Nikitaris's fish shop in Hobart, the POWs are imprisoned in the "tank of war". It is fitting, then, that they - although in a drunk frenzy - smash the shop after the war, freeing the fish into the sea.

Through the way Flanagan has narrated the novel, we are also invited to consider the perspectives of  different characters and, henceforth, different cultures in the novel. Unlike the Australian POWs, who sing when working, the Japanese approach the project of the railway with a strong, cold sense of nationalism that excludes responsibility and emphasizes duty:

War "is human beings . . . Railway might kill human beings, but I do not make human beings. I make railway. Progress does not demand freedom. Progress has no need of freedom. You, doctor, call it non-freedom. We call it spirit, nation, Emperor."

In a similarly cruelly pragmatic fashion, Major Nakaruma believes in the necessity of punishment by force. He is the one who encourages the beating of Darky Gardiner, a young sergeant who eventually drowns in his own excrement.

At one point in the novel, Evans says that he wants to curse God for "for our lives," for "not being here and for not saving the men burning on the f*cking bamboo.” In the novel, war is rightly portrayed as "a terrifying world in which one could not escape horror, in which violence was eternal, the great and only verity, greater than the civilizations it created, greater than any god man worshipped." 

And after the war?

We are told that some veterans turn to drink, some become fathers who can never hit their children and others "died off quickly, strangely, in car crashes and suicides and creeping diseases." Choi San- min tries to develop his "own idea," one divorced from his nationalistic learnings, but is unable to do so. His only consolation is killing anything, a cockroach, before he himself is hanged. What has the war done to him? As for our narrator, Dorrigo's shock when his wife calls him "Alwyn," reinforces the way he - having lost his identity in the war - returns to a former life that will never be the same for him. Indeed,

“He felt the withering of something, the way risk was increasingly evaluated and, as much possible, eliminated, replaced with a bland new world where the viewing of food preparation would be felt to be more moving than the reading of poetry; where excitement would come from paying for a soup made out of foraged grass. He had eaten soup made out of foraged grass in the camps; he preferred food. The Australia that took refuge in his head was mapped with the stories of the dead; the Australia of the living he found an ever stranger country."

So, the war clearly has a long-lasting effect on all who were embroiled in it. "The war pressed, the war deranged, the war undid, the war excused." But what do we remember of the war itself, and how? The structure of the novel is fittingly disjointed, as is memory.

Memory’s only like justice because it’s another wrong idea that makes people feel right.

He would live to see people praised for things that were not worthy of praise, simply because truth was seen to be bad for their feelings.

The aftermath of war brings the conflict between truth and memory. As Choi Sang-min reveals before his execution, some men were hanged even if they did not punish a single POW during the war.

As we are further invited to consider,

Nothing endures. Not empires, not memories. We remember nothing. Maybe for a year or two. Maybe most of a life, if we live. Maybe. But then we will die, and who will ever understand any of this?

We are told that “the Line was broken, as all lines finally are; and it was all for nothing, and of it nothing remained." Yet to replace the line is its "antithesis:" the death poem written by the Japanese poet Shisui, whose poem appears at the beginning of the novel and recurs at the end. It is "the circle," a "contained void, an endless mystery, lengthless breadth, the great wheel, eternal return."

The war is over, but it returns with unrelenting savagery. It returns to haunt Dorrigo, for example, when he finds out that - in the cleverest twist in the novel - Darky Gardiner was actually his nephew.

The importance of the circle is further reinforced by the novel's circular plot. In the first couple of pages, Dorry wonders what his aunt's real name is - in the final pages, he has his answer, "Ruth". In both the beginning and the end, he reminds us that "one man’s feeling is not always equal to all life is. Sometimes it’s not equal to anything much at all. He just stared into the flames."

Yet the one point on the circle that Flanagan keeps drawing us back to is Amy - "Amy, amante, amour." The first sentence of  the novel informs us that there is always light "at the beginning of things." Dorrigo's first encounter with Amy, whom he notices because of the light shone on her inside a bookstore, is thus imbued with significance.

Why involve a love story in a book about the war? I kept asking myself that question as I read on. Undoubtedly, both love and war bring out the "demon of desire" in men, although for different reasons. The separation of Amy and Dorrigo as a consequence of the war also reinforces all that the war has forced those involved in it to lose. Yet the balance between romance and death also sustains a sense of poetic beauty throughout the novel that, like the beautiful haikus scattered throughout and even recited before an execution, contrast sharply with the darkness of war and death.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a book that truly made me feel something. I was so tense during the amputation of Jack Rainbow's leg because something in Flanagan's tone suggested that Rainbow was not going to make it; when was a last time a book had me biting my nails in suspense? I had to read the description of beheadings through squinted eyes. When Dorrigo drives into a fire to save his family, at which point his children see a rare moment of tenderness pass between his parents, I wanted to cry.

"Of imperial dreams and dead men, all that remained was long grass." Yet The Narrow Road to the Deep Road is stunning in its attempt to tell this history poetically, faithfully and capture "the suffering, the deaths, the sorrow, the abject, pathetic pointlessness of such immense suffering by so many." As Flanagan points out, "maybe it all exists only within these pages and the pages of a few other books." But in life, "Horror just is," the same way we are infallibly reminded that the world "just is."

A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.

It’s only our faith in illusion that makes life possible. It’s believing in reality that does us in every time”

Humans are only one of many things and all these things long to live, and the highest form of living is freedom: a man to be a man, a cloud to be a cloud, bamboo to be bamboo.

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“Happiness, when it comes, is stronger than all the jerk girls in Santo Domingo combined.”

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When life gives you lemons, read anything written by Junot Díaz. I thought This is How you Lose Her was good, but The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao hits it out of the ballpark with infectious wit and 335 pages worth of what Michiko Kakutani from The New York Times aptly called, “adrenaline-powered prose.”

In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Díaz traces the family history and life story of Oscar de Léon, an overweight "ghetto nerd at the end of the world" who is fluent in Elvish, spews out words like "copacetic" in everyday conversation and is obsessed with, but sadly hopeless at wooing, women. Oscar is later nicknamed "Wao" because of his apparent resemblance to Oscar Wilde. I'll never know how Yunior, Oscar's roommate/best friend and the boyfriend of his sister (Lola) ever drew that comparison. While the novel is mostly set in modern-day New Jersey, its characters' stories often take us back to the time of Rafael Trujillo: the ruthless dictator who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961.

Before we even meet Oscar, our narrator announces that his whole family is victim to fúku - "a curse or a doom of some kind" - that was cast on Oscar's grandfather, Abelard, after he upset the Trujillo. We are offered compelling evidence, such as the cruel deaths of Abelard’s wife and his daughters, that suggests fúku has indeed plagued the de Léon family for centuries and continues to work its voodoo on poor Oscar.

The main reason why Oscar is so unpopular with the ladies is that he defies the traditional qualities of masculinity. As our narrator informs us, “he wasn't no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock.” Unlike Yunior, whose muscle mass and success with women make him an alpha male of sorts, Oscar is an absolute nerd whose “commitment to the Genres had become absolute” by high school. Such nerdery is exemplified by the countless allusions to nerdfare throughout the novel: Yunior and Oscar’s exchange of “Mellon” (I was over the moon when I read this), the fact that the Gangster  "wasn’t no ringwraith but wasn't no orc, either," the X-wings and TIE-fighters hanging from Oscar’s ceiling… Oscar and Yunior would have nothing to do with each other if it weren’t for Lola and their mutual, Santo Dominican-love for women.

Yet it is fitting that Oscar is obsessed with the fantastical, for he himself is often submerged in his own fantasies. For example, he believes that “La Jablesse” is “the one” although, ironically enough, La Jablesse (which means “Devil Woman” in French) is infamous in Caribbean folklore for seducing men and luring them astray. Similarly, Oscar wholeheartedly believes that Ybón will leave the police for him, although his relentless attempts to win her over eventually lead to his death. Fúku at work?

The very existence of fúku reflects the deep-rooted historical context and tradition in the novel. On the one hand, Díaz reveals the Trujillo’s tyranny through the extensive footnotes that recur every few pages. (The size 8 pt font was unbearable at first, but grew on me.) More effectively, Díaz sheds light on the dictator’s omnipresence through the characters’ stories. For example, there is a comic juxtaposition between the casual and fatal in Beli and the Gangster’s affair: she is naïve and infatuated while he is part of the Trujillo’s ruthless and dictatorial family circle.

Furthermore, a strong sense of cultural identity penetrates the novel. There is frequent mention of diaspora and the idea of running away from home; Lola, of course, tries to do this many times. Yet the motherland will always call you back. The pungent and familiar smell of home hits Oscar hard when he returns to the DR to find:

 "... the surreal whirligig that was life in La Capital - the guaguas, the cops, the mind-boggling poverty, the Dunkin' Donuts, the beggars, the Haitians selling roasted peanuts at the intersections, the mind-boggling poverty, the asshole tourists hogging up all the beaches, [...] the mind-boggling poverty, the snarl of streets and rusting zinc shacks that were the barrios populares, the masses of niggers he waded through every day who ran him over if he stood still, the skinny watchmen standing in front of stores with their brokedown shotguns, the music, [...] the mind-boggling poverty ..."

That’s the most fabulous run-on sentence I’ve read in a while.

Of course, Díaz’s style contributes most to the indelible mark of culture in the novel. Our narrator is well versed in Dominican lingo, hitting us with “homeboys” from the very beginning. Thanks to Junot Díaz, I’ve learned my fair share of Spanish swear words. On a more serious note, however, such coarse language also mirrors the undercurrent of violence in the novel.

The brutality that increasingly emerges towards the end can be so shocking that you almost don’t believe it. We move from reading about LoTR in one page to Oscar’s beatings in another. Yet Díaz has a way of effortlessly planting dark humour in the midst of the horrific: “We’ll let you go if you tell us what fuego means in English. Fire, he blurted out, unable to help himself.” The storytelling way in which the novel unravels itself and the everyday naturalness of the surreal events that occur (e.g. the appearance of the mongoose) reminded me of the magic realism in Gabriel García Márquez’s The 100 Years of Solitude. What you read seems impossible, but – on mere pages – becomes utterly believable.  

Although the narrator of the novel is almost invisible, a seamless and flawless transition reveals Yunior to be our the storyteller. Perhaps this is why the title is not The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar de Léon, but rather The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – after all, Yunior came up with that nickname.

Just as when I read This is How You Lose Her, I'm struck by how effortlessly I support the protagonists. I mean, if I met anyone as stalker-ish and gaming-obsessed as Oscar in real life, I'd most likely make a run for it. Yet I wait impatiently for him to reappear in the novel as I read on, my fingers crossed that he will lose his virginity before his brief, wondrous life is over. I suppose this is the power of literature: it connects readers and characters, relays the impossible and elicits sympathy for the hopeless. Although Hong Kong and Santo Domingo are 22+ hours apart by plane, I was actually able to see a sliver of myself in Oscar:

“He read The Lord of the Rings for what I’m estimating the millionth time, one of his greatest loves and comforts since he’d first discovered it, back when he was nine and lost and lonely and his favourite librarian had said, Here try this, and with one suggestion changed his life. Got through almost the whole trilogy, but then the line “and out of Far Harad black men like half-trolls” and he had to stop, his head and his heart hurting too much.”

There is much respect for the written word in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Early on, Yunior tells us that writing the book is his zafa, the counterspell to fúku. Indeed, when Oscar writers 15 pages in one sitting, is he not also writing to save himself? Yet regardless of whether or not fúku truly exists, “that’s life for you. All the happiness you gather to yourself, it will sweep away like it’s nothing. If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough.”

So, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is an extraordinarily funny and moving tribute to nerds, the culture of the DR and – of course – “the beauty!” of life.

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Quotes from The Goldfinch

Fabulous graphic from the NYT:



I didn't want to post these quotes with my review (because we would then be looking at ~2,000 words), but here are my favourite passages from Donna's Tartt's The Goldfinch.

"To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole; but ever since the painting had vanished from under me I'd felt drowned and extinguished by vastness -- not just the predictable vastness of time, and space, but the impassible distances between people even when they were within arm's reach of each other, and with a swell of vertigo I thought of all the places I'd been and all the places I hadn't, a world lost and vast and unknowable, dingy maze of cities and alleyways, far-drifting ash and hostile immensities, connections missed, things lost and never found, and my painting swept away on that powerful current and drifting out there somewhere: a tiny fragment of spirit, faint spark bobbing on a dark sea."

Weren't we, as sentient beings, put upon the earth to be happy, in the brief time allotted to us?

“For humans-trapped in biology-there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage. Time destroyed us all soon enough. But to destroy, or lose, a deathless thing-to break bonds stronger than the temporal-was a metaphysical uncoupling all its own, a startling new flavor of despair.”

“The world is much stranger than we know or can say. And I know how you think, or how you like to think, but maybe this is one instance where you can’t boil down to pure ‘good’ or pure ‘bad’ like you always want to do.”

“Because--isn't it drilled into us constantly, from childhood on, an unquestioned platitude in the culture--? From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rousseau to Rumi to Tosca to Mister Rogers, it's a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do? How do we know what's right for us? Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: "Be yourself." "Follow your heart."

Only here's what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted--? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight toward a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?...If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away? Stop your ears with wax? Ignore all the perverse glory your heart is screaming at you? Set yourself on the course that will lead you dutifully towards the norm, reasonable hours and regular medical check-ups, stable relationships and steady career advancement the New York Times and brunch on Sunday, all with the promise of being somehow a better person? Or...is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?

If a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see and think and feel, you don't think, 'oh I love this painting because it's universal' 'I love this painting because it speaks to mankind'. That's not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It's a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes, you. An individual heart shock. . . .A really great painting is fluid enought to work its way into the mind and heart through all different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular.

“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life."

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I needed Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch the same way I needed Steven Toltz's A Fraction of a Whole. Please give me a considerably-sized work of literature, my body had been begging for weeks, and preferably a bildungsroman.

In The Goldfinch, Tartt traces young Theo Decker's journey from childhood to adulthood. In this whirlwind of an adventure, Theo's life is turned topsy-turvy. After his mother is killed by an explosion at an art museum, from which he escapes, he sojourns at the home of his wealthy childhood friend, Andy Barbour. Then, the sudden reappearance of his alcoholic father - whom he detests - sends him to Las Vegas, where he meets his best friend for life: the reckless, fearless and foul-mouthed Russian emigrant, Boris. The death of Theo's father, however, prompts Theo to return to New York and once more into the antique-filled, homey shop of James "Hobie" Hobart, the furniture restorer who was once business partners with Welton "Welty" Blackwell. Welty is the elderly man who, in the wreckage of the museum, had given Theo not only a ring that sent him to Hobart, but also instructions that - in the eyes of 13-year-old Theo - had urged him to seize and salvage the most precious painting in the room: The Goldfinch.

No matter where Theo is, be it in the Barbours' pristine dining room or the god-forsaken Las Vegas desert, The Goldfinch is the undercurrent that anchors him to his childhood, to his beloved mother and to the lovely red-haired girl who had wandered through the museum with Welty and lives in his antique shop: Pippa. The Goldfinch, beautiful and impenetrable (as all age-old paintings are), makes Theo feel "less mortal" and "less ordinary." As he says, it "was the secret that raised me above the surface of life and enabled me to know who I am. And it's there: in my notebooks, every page, even though it's not." Because of The Goldfinch, however, Theo's whole life is "balanced atop a secret that might at any moment blow apart." Indeed, he lives in perpetual fear of someone discovering his well-kept secret and jailing him for art theft. Although Theo keeps the painting well hidden and is initially protected from this fate, his arrest becomes increasingly plausible when he discovers, years later in New York, that Boris had taken advantage of one of his hangovers to steal The Goldfinch and trade it in underground black markets for cash (nasty surprise).

So, page ~750 onwards is dedicated to Boris and Theo's (mostly Boris’s) hunt for the precious painting. How did Boris even end up living the gangster life? How did Theo manage to run into him in New York? Indeed, one of the most significant themes in this novel is chance. Channeling Dickens in plot twist after plot twist, Tartt creates a level of suspense that leaves readers attributing all the near-impossible yet somehow explainable happenings in the novel to the machinery of fate. The idea of ‘if’ is introduced to readers early on in the novel, as poor Theo torments himself with the ‘ifs’ that may have saved his mother—what if they had gone to eat lunch first? What if they had left the museum earlier?
Chance also strikes the reader through the other deaths in the novel: the death of Theo’s father (and the fact that he even turned up to begin with), the death of Mr. Barbour and Andy (the absolutely innocent!), the death of a gangster at the unwitting hands of Theo…
The authority of chance is also hammered into Theo as his gambling, astrology-trusting father tells him, “there’s always more to things, a hidden level.” Theo’s father, "waiting to make the big bets when Mercury was in retrograde, reaching for a knowledge just beyond the known,” had always insisted that “there’s a pattern and we’re part of it.” Yet Tartt also alludes to the cruelty of such chance in saying that you would “hit an emptiness so dark that it destroyed, categorically, anything you’d ever looked at or thought of as light,” if you “scratched very deep at that idea of pattern.” It does seem merciless that Theo is inevitably driven to adulthood by chance, so much that is not in his favour.

Perhaps the one silver lining in Theo’s world of arbitrariness is that chance also sends him back to The Goldfinch (albeit temporarily):

I was different, but it wasn’t. As the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological static just as random as the street lamps flashing past.

What also strikes me about The Goldfinch is how ‘true’ it is – not that anything close to Theo’s unique adventure could ever happen in real life (ah, fiction!), but Theo’s decline into the world of booze and meth is certainly plausible and perhaps even predictable given the unmentioned, yet definite, post-traumatic stress order he battles after his mother’s death.

For instance,

“Sometimes even a bad movie or a gruesome dinner party cold trigger it, short term boredom and long term pain, temporary panic and permanent desperation striking all at once and flaring up in such an ashen, desolate light that I saw, really saw, looking back down the years and with all clear-headed and articulate despair, that the world and everything in it was intolerably and permanently fucked and nothing had ever been good or okay, unbearable claustrophobia of the soul, the windowless room, no way out, waves of shame and horror, leave me alone, my mother dead on a marble floor, stop it stop it, muttering aloud to myself in elevators, in cabs, leave me alone, I want to die, a cold, intelligent, self-immolating fury that had – more than once – driven me upstairs in a resolute fog to swallow indiscriminate combos of whatever booze and pills I happen to have on hand.”

The novel seems even more “realistic” because the painting itself is indeed real – not fictional – and was painted by the Dutch artist Carel Fabritius in 1654. What also keeps Theo’s story grounded in modern-day life are the 21st century allusions consistent throughout the novel. For example, Boris insists on nicknaming Theo “Potter,” a reference that is so deeply familiar to me that I was often thrown off whenever anyone yelled, “Hey, Potter.” Tartt also references Lady Gaga and – I’m sure of it – Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow’s daughter.
Although Boris calling Theo “Potter” was hilarious, I’ve always found that fiction loses some element of its magic when brought to the surface of “real life,” and The Goldfinch is unfortunately no exception.

Speaking of reality, The Goldfinch revolves around the theme of illusion. At the beginning of the novel, Theo’s mother suddenly has the sensation of a “time warp” as she makes her way down Park Avenue. It’s a “way of seeing things twice, or more than twice.” Similarly, Theo himself is tricked countless times throughout the novel – by the absolutely unreliable Boris, by his father who pretends to be interested in setting up a bank account for him (only to use his social security number to try and leech his savings) and by Kitsey Barbour, who – alas – cheats on him. Even the painting itself is a trompe-l'œil that creates the illusion of distance. Indeed, Theo (in one of his more pessimistic moods) considers life a nasty illusion in general:

“Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. ... But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten from top to bottom.”

Yet Theo also experiences a sweeter kind of illusion in childhood with Pippa (whom he calls his “morphine lollipop”—so childishly tender):

“And the flavor of Pippa's kiss [on my cheek]—bittersweet and strange—stayed with me all the way back uptown, swaying and sleepy as I sailed home on the bus, melting with sorrow and loveliness, a starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.”

Of course, it is tragic that Pippa eventually settles for the mediocre Everett while Theo is lovelessly engaged to Pippa’s polar opposite, the cool and upper class Kitsey Barbour. Here, Theo’s illusions are crushed by reality as Pippa reminds him that they, both vulnerably PTSD victims, wouldn’t be good for each other.

So, what makes The Goldfinch so irresistible? So worth staying up late and getting up early for? On the one hand, it’s most certainly the plot. Tartt teases the picture of the painting on the cover of the novel, names the novel The Goldfinch, yet hides the painting away for 7/10 of the book. Where is it, we wonder, as we maddeningly read on.
Apart from plot, there is no doubt that Tartt’s style is next in line as the most significant element that sustains your read. Fabulously long run-on sentences propel you through Theo’s story; Boris’s long-winded rambles are infectiously entertaining; Tartt’s frequent use of parenthesis (almost exorbitantly so, at the end) are your windows into Theo’s anxiety and frustration; as long as someone is speaking, which is often the case, the book refuses to be put down. Watching Tartt’s interviews, I realize that she speaks as she writes – quickly, keenly and clearly.

At times strenuous, repetitive and factually dubitable, however, The Goldfinch was not always an easy read. There are certainly passages in the novel that demand a “cut to the chase” response (especially during one of Boris’s self-indulgent rants), just as the plausibility of a great number of incidents deserves to be questioned (so much simply left to chance!). The Goldfinch is a rollercoaster ride. It’s exhilarating, but too many repetitive loops and turns do leave you feeling a bit light-headed.

Nonetheless, The Goldfinch deserves the Pulitzer because what we hear in Theo’s voice is the magic that keeps us turning the pages. We hear Theo’s longing for his mother, a childish anxiety and naivety that drive him to hide the painting, an adolescent frustration that sends him into the hallucinatory world of drug and drink, an omnipresent terror of being discovered and arrested, and a growing sense of mature understanding that emerges most profoundly at the end of the novel.

I recently read the first chapter of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, which won the Pulitzer in 2005. The Goldfinch is probably its polar opposite in terms of style and pace. In the former, a pastor speaks to us throughout the novel in a slow, steady voice; in the latter, everything seems to tumble out of the pages in a magnificent storytelling way. The Luminaries (another huge novel), which won the Man Booker Prize last year, also has this effect. But regardless of whatever ‘kind’ of novel now sits on the crest of literary acclaim,

“I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.”

Theo does this for The Goldfinch, and I certainly hope to do it for books.


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Tinkering

Tinkers by Paul Harding
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Who is a tinker, and what does a tinker do?

Simply put, a tinker is a repairer - someone who mends various contraptions, fixes broken instruments and gets into the tiny, metallic, brass-filled heart of appliances to make necessary adjustments.

In Paul Hardings' 2010 Pulitzer-Prize winning novel Tinkers, we meet two such characters: George Washington Crosby and his father, Howard Aaron Crosby.

Throughout the novel, each either tinkers with clocks, various paraphernalia in the drawers of wagons, and finally - in an attempt to revisit the past or as a result of being helplessly thrown back in time because of a hallucination - their own memories.

The novel begins with George Washington Crosby, who is suffering one such hallucination:
"George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died."
Using variations on that same sentence, Harding places markers throughout the novel that gradually count down the hours to the day George dies (the end of the novel).

The story itself, however, does not progress so linearly. Rather, key moments in the childhoods of both George and Howard are fleshed out in the span of 191 pages in prose that is at once devoid of quotation marks yet punctuated by italicized text and the occasional 'extract from a manual' (more on that later). Indeed, why should there be any quotation marks? After all, everything is happening inside George's/Howard's head. It is therefore fitting that Harding also heavily uses parentheses to indicate interruptions in otherwise ceaseless trains of thought - thought that is often spelled out in long, Proust-worthy sentences.

(don't feel obliged to read the quote below, but it's a great example of 1) Harding's style 2) George's reflection on death as he considers his future )

“And so this end in confusion, where when things stop I never get to know it, and this moving is the space, is that what is yet to be, which is for others to see filled wherever it may finally be in the frame when the last pieces are fitted and the others stop, and there will be the stopped pattern, the final array [...272 words...] why can't I stop all the moving and look out over the vast arrangements and find by the contours and colors and qualities of light where my father is, not to solve anything but just simple even to see it again one last time, before what, before it ends, before it stops. But it doesn't stop; it simply ends. It is a final pattern scattered without so much as a pause at the end, at the end of what, at the end of this.”

Apart from these long sentences, extracts taken from various manuals (e.g. The Reasonable Horologist) also appear in Tinkers and deal mostly with clocks: their parts, their history, their inner workings: time. After all, the characters are all so immersed in time and revisit it throughout the novel. In remembering his past and remembering about his father, George is 'tinkering' with time and his memory of his father. In changing his name after running away from home, Howard is tinkering with his identity.

Another defining stylistic feature of Tinkers emerges in Harding's very detailed descriptions of nature.
Here's a lovely example:

Those early flowers smelled like cold water. Their fragrance was not the still perfume of high summer; it was the mineral smell of cold, raw green. He crouched to look at a daffodil. Its six-petaled corona was fully unfurled, like a bright miniature sun. A bee crawled in its cup, massaging stigma and anther and style. 

Indeed, nature is omnipresent in Tinkers and tied to its characters. The mute and enigmatic Gilbert practically seems like wild nature in homo sapien form; at one point, Howard's brain is likened to branches that flare in the "metallic blue of dusk" before they are "drained from the sky."

When Howard has his epileptic seizures, a thick stick shoved into his mouth saves him from biting off his tongue and leaves him with bark caught between in teeth. So the presence of the natural world in Tinkers isn't 'light;' such an image brims with violence. Nature in this novel is described with such detail, strength and rawness that Harding's language itself is what powerfully transforms the experience of reading Tinkers. His diction, although not always reader-friendly, is what magnifies an otherwise short 192-page novel into a work that transcends time.

I don't think Tinkers changed my life or is a book that will, mostly due to its inaccessible prose. But I can still see why it won the Pulitzer - Tinkers is deep despite its brevity, thought-provoking and absolutely, ABSOLUTELY beautifully written.

Choose any hour on the clock. It is possible, then, to conceive that the clock’s purpose is to return the hands back to that time, a time which, from the moment chosen, the hands leave and skate across the rest of the clock’s painted signs and calibrations and numbers. These other markings on the face become irrelevant in themselves; they are now simply clues pointing in the direction of the chosen time. It is then possible, too, to conceive of the clock’s gears and springs as each having its own intrinsic function, but within a whole mechanism, the larger purpose of which is to return to the chosen time. In this manner, the clock resembles the universe.

Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn’t it?

And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember : You will be dead and buried soon enough.

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