“The Goldfinch”: stars are beautiful because of the space between them

“…You are not mad, or wild, or grieving! You are not roaring out to choke her with your 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 to live and be happy in the world is a woman who has her own life and lets you have yours.” – Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch

Boris, the Tweedledee to the protagonist’s Tweedledum, kind of has a point. Loving someone or someone too much usually comes with a host of unpleasant consequences. So it’s probably a bad thing, this love I have for The Goldfinch. A bad thing – and an irresistible thing.

Like most people, I first fell in love with Donna Tartt’s writing when I read “The Secret History,” a voluptuous, gorgeous, improbable novel. Unlike most people, I didn’t howl with rage at her unexpected follow-up, “The Little Friend.” It was an unsatisfying, brutal sort of book, but I respected what the author was trying to do with it. Living in Russia these last few years, I have gained new appreciation for “The Little Friend,” because of the idea that life is weird and abrupt, and not all sad stories have a resolution, and not all ends can be seen.

The one genuine complaint I had about “The Little Friend” was the recurring feeling that the author was firmly keeping her characters at an arm’s length, never inhabiting them fully. That kind of clinical approach worked well for Nabokov in his later years, but when it comes to a literary mystery, it makes the reader feel a little cheated. “The Little Friend” is a fine example of masterful prose that’s also a little too cold and shiny and, therefore, ultimately a bit lifeless.

So when the months of anticipation were finally over and “The Goldfinch” had arrived, I kept wondering, as I read, when Tartt might smack me over the head again. I steeled myself. I made copious notes as I read – waiting for the inevitable emotional letdown.

And then, of course, the sublime happened and kept happening.

Donna Tartt is one of the most important writers of our time, and important writers are always more than just skilled and precise. Their great works are always just a little crazy – all of that over-quoted stuff about Nietzsche’s internal chaos giving birth to a “dancing star” is no less true for being featured in too many Facebook profiles. And “The Goldfinch” is a deliciously mad, courageous sort of work.

Tartt’s prose still has that glinting edge to it. She hasn’t lost the hoodoo or the sarcasm. But “The Goldfinch” also covers great expanses – of joy, sorrow, the geography of the world and human love and longing – and does so fearlessly and with the kind of abandon that is reminiscent of the brush-strokes of its celebrated namesake, painted by Carel Fabritius shortly before his death at 32.

Out of all the motifs running through the book, one of my favorites (and one that I haven’t really seen many critics mention), is the repeated comparisons made between protagonist Theo Decker and Harry Potter, otherwise known as The Boy Who Lived. “The Goldfinch” is far from a fantasy – but in its references to Harry Potter, it recognizes the human need for the magical and fantastic, for what Kate Atkinson calls “the golden mountain, the fire-breathing dragon, the happy ending,” at the end of her own modern masterpiece, “Human Croquet.”

The magical in this instance is art, both high art in the traditional sense and the art of what Theo refers to as “beautiful things” (and is there really that much of a difference? The book seems to suggest that no, there isn’t). While nobody comes along to usher Theo into a parallel, Hogwarts-like universe – there is this perfectly articulated sense of the inevitability of being forced to step sideways out of one’s own existence, into a dimension that’s darker and stranger. Tartt’s instruments here are painful and powerful, and her ultimate scope is astonishing. I have the sense I’ll be thinking about this book for a decade (and won’t stop thinking about it when, hopefully, the next Tartt book arrives).

A lot of good novels are like monuments. The best ones are like old houses – humming with internal energy, lit up from the inside. “The Goldfinch” is one of those – the place you want to stay for a long time, and not because you’re escaping from anything. Within “The Goldfinch” you’re always moving toward some understanding, trying to bridge some distance. Like a great painting would, the book bends time – reaching out and addressing the reader. And it makes you feel as though these words are meant for you alone.

Anna Arutunyan does a liberal translation of Alexander Vvedensky

This is an excerpt from the “Guest on a Horse” poem:

Sleek and simple was the stallion
As transparent as a stream.
Long of mare and hurried temper,
Said that he would like some cream.
“I’m the chairman of this meeting!
Come to join you and parley.
Teach me what to do, Creator!”
God replied to him, “Okay.”
Then the stallion took a stand
And I looked into his hand.
He wasn’t frightening!
And I realized then, I sinned.
God had taken from me matter:
Body, consciousness and will.
Everything came back to me.
In the boiling pot was winter;
In the stream a prison’s chill.
In the flower there was sickness.
In the june bug – strife, discord.
None of it made sense to me.
Could it be you’re absent, God?
#Misfortune

If you read more about who Vvedensky was – and how he ended up – the goosebumps will be more plentiful.

Once again, this is a very liberal translation, but that’s precisely why I like it.

I often wonder where a mind like Vvedensky’s goes after death. You can imagine it to be a kind of mind that doesn’t entirely leave the landscape. I was once walking back from a wedding on a summer night in the Middle of Nowhere, Vladimir region, Russia, and as the tall grass swayed in the breeze on either side of the path, someone said, “The grass is full of dead poets” – and it was the truest thing I’d ever heard about that place.

gena in the grass

Peloponnese

My first introduction to Greece happened when I was very young, and reading a rather liberal translation (more like an interpretation) of some Ancient Greek myths. It featured stuff like, “Hera was not classically beautiful, but anyone who had ever tasted the pleasures that fill the curves of a woman’s body appreciated her.” I believed that Greeks know everything there is to know about sex – and may have possibly invented it, in the same fashion that they invented democracy.

In later years, my aunt went to Greece. She came back with tales of aching beauty and introduced me to the saying, “They have everything in Greece.” I would argue that “they don’t have lions.” “You don’t need lions in Greece,” she would retort.

When I grew older, I made friends with Greeks, chief among them the artist Stavros Pavlides, who was in my year at Duke. I have loved few of my male friends with a so-called “pure” love – other things were always getting in the way – but with Stavros, it was always different. Over the years of us being separated by a huge ocean, I should have gotten more casual about it, but I don’t think I have. Some feelings you carry around with you forever, some people you always miss.

I learned that Greece was troubled, political, isolated, welcoming. I heard about the rappers and the cops and the graffiti and the farmers and the Italian mob’s war against the local olive oil. I learned about the forces of light and dark – the ones that almost always came out looking gray in the day.

I went on to marry a man obsessed with Greece for both objective and subjective reasons.

Last year, friends arranged for us to go to Crete. It was there that I really understood that there is no such thing as an “escape,” no matter what the advertisements say.

Now, on this trip to the Peloponnese, that point has been driven home once again. I suppose everyone had that one place that speaks the truth to them – for me, it’s the mountains here, and the sea, and the wind and the silence that exists in its absence. This is not the orderly vacation I was hoping her – and it serves me right, I guess.

It’s also more beautiful than I could have imagined – and I have a pretty wild imagination.

On this trip, I keep talking to the late Reynolds Price in my head. He was my professor at Duke, my introduction to the dining room drama of writers’ lives. I got closer to him when the wonderful Thomas Pfau suggested I work for the English Department at a time when my life had veered dramatically off course and I found myself feeling alone and financially insecure in a way that terrified me. I thought then that it would just be a phase (lol).

Reynolds could be prickly and ridiculous – because he was human – but he also reminded me of who I am, who I really am, I mean. The foundation beneath the rubble, etc. “I take you seriously, you know,” he randomly told me once. “I hope that one of these days, you’ll take yourself seriously too.”

Now I spend my days in conversation. “Isn’t it nice to wake up in an olive grove, Reynolds?” “Don’t you think these fried little fishes are the seafood equivalent of popcorn?” “Hey Reynolds, check out the way the sun is hitting that mountain.” “What do you think about that shadow that belongs to that tree?”

The dead are awfully convenient to talk to, especially since they can’t tell you to shut the fuck up.

It was, meanwhile, Thomas who reminded me of the fact that you have to let yourself be messy while young – travel around, get yourself into stupid situations, let the winds mess you up, that sort of thing. Maybe I’m too old for that, or maybe I’m just getting started. I can’t tell. I guess I can never say that I didn’t listen.

Different threads run through every life, and what gets strung upon them will always surprise you. Time is linear to humans, because that’s all our bodies can bear. I suspected that years ago, I think I know it now.

The Greek landscape speaks to me in Reynolds’ voice, in Auden’s words:

“The nightingales are sobbing in
The orchards of our mothers,
And hearts that we broke long ago
Have long been breaking others;
Tears are round, the sea is deep:
Roll them overboard and sleep.”

Round here

It’s not a vacation until you meet two gay German tourists on a pier on a wild beach, and these tourists will warn you off swimming on account of a solitary pink jellyfish. But then you’ll go swimming anyway, because it doesn’t feel like September and there are so many minutes left in the morning. And then you’ll take a spill on the slick surface of the pier and scratch up your knee, and the Germans will giggle – but not in a mean way.

On the Peloponnese, Cyprus trees punctuate the quiet landscape like exclamation marks and the water looks like palace marble at twilight.

I told myself that I would use the holiday to write, but instead I’m using it to holiday.

My great reads of the year, so far: Kate Atkinson, Justin Cronin, Ali Eteraz, Graham Joyce

Life After Life: I’m a Kate Atkinson groupie and I love her recent spate of crime novels, but was so glad when she came back to playing with time and family and gnarled old fate in “Life After Life.” Maybe it’s the groupie in me talking, but I feel that Atkinson so rarely gets the kind of ecstatic praise she truly deserves. I think people don’t quite allow themselves to understand how truly brilliant, how landscape-altering her writing is, because it’s commercially successful and hits all of the right notes and has a robust plot. Atkinson walks along the raggedy edge and dips her toes into the sublime. “Life After Life” is a novel of starts and stops on the surface – but the closer you look at it, the more you see that this is the kind of book that takes the idea that the universe is “elegant” and applies it to the novel and wins.

The Passage and The Twelve: Thanks to an agent friend in NY, I fell in love with Justin Cronin this year. His apocalyptic vampire trilogy is fantastic so far, and I can’t wait for the final book. Cronin doesn’t just get horror – he gets people. He gets what it means to bring a child into a terrible, terrible world. I’m a parent – and Cronin hits me where it hurts. He reminds me of the idea that the apocalypse is not some single event fixed in time – rather, its a narrative told and re-told every time an innocent is killed. There is nothing escapist about his writing – the “escapist” label is actually one I truly despise, particularly when it gets slapped onto genuine works of art that grapple with the issues we face every day by utilizing an imaginative set of devices. There is a brilliant paradox at the heart of “The Passage” and “The Twelve,” the idea that a single life is nothing – and everything.

Children of Dust: The dude who blogs under the name Ali Eteraz is someone I consider an online friend – though while I’ve always been a fan of his wonderful writing, there was that performative aspect to it that made me feel resigned to the fact that I’m never going to see him fully. Forget about Russia being a mystery wrapped in an enigma – Eteraz totally has that notion beat. Well, his memoir “Children of Dust,” which came out a few years ago, doesn’t make me feel any closer to “the real Ali Eteraz” – and that doesn’t matter, because I discovered Amir in its pages (Ali Eteraz is a pseudonym, in case you are wondering). I still don’t think the memoir genre exists so that we can cozy up to the author – but damn, I felt close to Amir. And I loved “Children of Dust” for its cleverness, it’s humor, the longing contained within its pages, the philosophical debate the memoir has with itself. There are brilliant snapshots of Pakistan, the States, the Arabian desert. There is much sadness and joy and masks getting ripped off and new masks showing through – and the kind of artistic daring that people in the West rarely associate with Islam (which is a huge oversight, incidentally).

The Silent Land: Although this book also has the kind of robust plot structure I am a fan of, what it reveals in the end isn’t nearly as important as the way in which it portrays marriage and the transience of physical existence. This is the kind of writing that I would compare to a symphony that features this second track, this gentle murmur about death and dying and atoms coming apart and love being the only thing there is.