Bird song

Almost 800 pages!! Of small print. But I had the time and the patience, you require both to go through this detailed tome.

There are times I wondered why the book was so detailed, at times I loved the vivid detailing.

Moments when I loved Theo for his innocence, moments when I wondered if his coldness could get tot me. 

Can love it, easy to hate it. A coming of age novel spread across cities, visiting countries.

The central figure as the title mentions is the painting. It revolves around loss and finding.

The protagonist Theo loses his mother to a bombing incident very early in the story. But he finds something at the same time. Something his mom loved- the Goldfinch. painting of a bird chained to a perch.The rest of the story is about  the bad choices Theo makes, the company he seeks, the opportunities he loses, his binge drinking, drug addictions, thieving, cheating, wily ways.There is a sense of disgust for the person he has become for the shallow life he leads. The storyline repels you, there is no reason to pity the person he has become, just disappointment. Sure there is PTSD, but that does not justify the reclusive behaviour .

But I kept reading, 

The author weaves the story around the main character with so much detail, the imagery is so vivid.

I could smell the old furniture store, walk  the deserted street in Vegas where Theo lives with his dad and Xandra, burn with the fever which punishes him in Amsterdam, hear Boris coaxing Theo to run amuck.

At times the descriptive writing goes on for pages without much being said. The ending could have come sooner.

The book will not be a recommendation from me to my daughter for it is a lesson on "how not to live your life and ruin it" or in a rebellious mode, it could turn into "how to live my life to ruin it”T he author makes it worthwhile through her descriptive prose, if she wanted us to be disgusted and repulsed, she has done well with the story.

The movie which I watched almost 4 months after I read the book, left me wondering if this was the same story.

It has been shredded, to fit into an acceptable screening time.The descriptive writing is absent in the movie and does not do justice to the details in the book.

It is rushed and seems to go back and forth between the years. The 2 1/2 hours of movie time had to be broken down to allow the mind time to recover between the various stages of life.

There is no humour at all and leaves you frowning, And I liked my visualisation while I read the book better than what is portrayed in the movie.

Give it a miss if you are a reader. Give it a miss if you like watching movies!

“But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.”

― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch