Madeline
I had thought I had read The Goldfinch for years. Every time I saw the title somewhere or the cover, I said to myself, “yep, I’ve read that.” Then one day when I was looking for something to watch on television, I saw that it was made into a movie. Not sixty seconds into the movie did I realize that I have never read this book.
It took me a long while to realize I was confusing The Goldfinch for Cuckoo’s Calling, a story about a supermodel who is killed. Not at all like The Goldfinch. It took me awhile to realize it was two books with birds in the name and published in the mid 2010s.
This is a long way of telling my dear reader that I finally picked up the long book, The Goldfinch and listened to all twenty-two hours of it.
Premise of The Goldfinch
The book starts with a boy, Theo, on the edge of puberty going to a museum with his mother instead of going to school due a suspension from school. At the museum he becomes fascinated with a girl he has never met and along side her is an older man. Then a bomb goes off. He has a heart jerking with the man’s last minutes and later finds out his mother was killed.
When the reader learns his mother has died, the reader can make an educated guess on where the story goes. And although it goes there, it goes a million other directions too. It goes to drugs and alcohol. It goes to a Maltese dog named Popchik. It goes to Las Vegas and back to New York again. It goes into gangsters and their enforcers. It goes to knock off art. But most importantly, as the reader suspects from before the explosion, it goes back to the girl in the museum. And back to her again.
Listening To The Goldfinch vs. Reading It
I really enjoyed this book but the voices the reader used during dialog gave a cartoon like tone that the rest of the book did not have. The characters descriptions did not sound like their voices and the images I had for them made my imagination go back and forth between reality and cartoon reality, in a way like Cool World.
Xandra, for example, Theo’s stepmother was described as a middle aged women who drank too much but had a perfect body and wore really revealing clothes. From the voice used for her, she sounded like she was 90 years old.
For Hobie, the older friend and ward of Theo, all I could picture was the actor, John Lithgow. And although the book described him as tall, he also was a bit younger than his dialog voice.
Finally, Theo’s best friend Boris’s voice fit closely to what I pictured; however, they met in their early teens and the narrator made him sound like the Polish gangster he eventually became, but did he start that way when he was twelve?
There was a number of characters that had different voices that did not match their character and how I pictured them. In addition, the cartoonish style voices did not match the artful descriptions of these characters. It was difficult to picture exactly how they would look if I read their descriptions rather than heard them.
Final Thoughts
Although it was long, this was one of the best books I’ve read in a long time; however, read it, don’t listen to it. And if you must listen to it, do a bit of research before committing 32.5 hours of cartoon voices.
