![]() ![]() It’s a work that shows us how many emotional octaves Ms. Tartt’s gift for orchestrating suspense (showcased in her best-selling and much-talked-about 1992 debut, “ The Secret History”) with the hard-won knowledge she acquired in her ungainly 2002 novel, “ The Little Friend,” of how to map the interior lives of her characters. 11 era, and, most especially, an old-fashioned Bildungsroman, complete with a “Great Expectations”-like plot involving an orphan, his moral and sentimental education and his mysterious benefactor. ![]() “The Goldfinch” is at once a thriller involving the theft and disappearance of the Fabritius painting, a panoramic portrait of New York (and, for that matter, America) in the post-Sept. 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. His “Goldfinch” is considered a small but priceless masterpiece of Dutch painting. The goldfinch referred to in the title of Donna Tartt’s dazzling new novel is a charming painting of a pet bird created in 1654 by the Dutch artist Carel Fabritius, who died that year at 32, when the gunpowder arsenal in Delft exploded, destroying part of the city. ![]()
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