The Goldfinch / Donna Tartt

My book companion for the last several weeks has been the 750+ page Donna Tartt novel, The Goldfinch. I’ll probably go through Goldfinch-withdrawal now, not knowing what’s going on the lives of Theo, Boris, Pippa, and Hobie.

I really enjoyed it, though truth be told, there were some spots where I felt it dragged just a bit. In the final analysis I thought it was really three books (or more) instead of just the one. There was the JD Salinger-ish first part of the book where Theo inhabits the Upper East Side and lives a life a bit reminiscent of Holden Caulfield, then the book drastically changes gear into a Kerouac or Russell Banks Rule of the Bone-type drug-addled foray as Theo moves in with his no-good father in Las Vegas, then finally in Amsterdam it’s like The Godfather. Tying it all together thematically is the wonderful but diminutive Dutch master painting of the goldfinch, which I’ve had the great fortune to see in a couple different museums in my life (most recently across the street at the High Museum!).

I can see this being made into a BBC miniseries for Masterpiece Theatre or the like. It really wouldn’t translate well into a movie since it is just so long. Still, it’s a great story, well written, and is one, no doubt, that will remain with me for some time to come.

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Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

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Murder in Passy, An Aimée Leduc Investigation / Cara Black

If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...

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