Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch to be published in October

I know it's been a long time since I posted something. Took me more than a year to get back to this blog. In blogging terms compared to the real world that would be like, let me think... EXACTLY 11 years! Which is precisely the amount of time that will have passed by since Donna Tartt's second novel The Little Friend came out when finally her third, The Goldfinch, will be published on October 22. If you travelled along my pages here, you might have taken note that her third novel has always been on top of my eagerly awaited list of things to come. This is now how Amazon describes it:

A young boy in New York City, Theo Decker, miraculously survives an explosion that takes the life of his mother. Alone and determined to avoid being taken in by the city as an orphan, Theo scrambles between nights in friends’ apartments and on the city streets. He becomes entranced by the one thing that reminds him of his mother: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that soon draws Theo into the art underworld.

Composed with the skills of a master, The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America. It is a story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention, and the enormous power of art.

The 2008 press release from Little, Brown described it as

a story of loss and obsession about a young man, guilt-stricken and damaged after the death of his mother, and the growing power that a stolen piece of art exercises over him, drawing him into an underworld of theft and corruption where nothing is as it seems .

Someone noted that the remaining 8 months will feel way longer than the past 10 years. To make it easier for all of us, why not reread The Secret History or The Little Friend or listen to Donna's brilliant voice on the audiobook versions of them. Those, especially The Secret History (The Little Friend comes only in a heavily abridged version with her reading it herself) and her reading of True Grit are the epitome of storytelling. She is, after all, a master storyteller in every respect.

I wrote something about one and a half years back on her. Just scroll down or click these links: Donna Tartt takes her time and Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling...

Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling...

...and our story shall be the education of our heroes. - Plato, Republic - Book II

I certainly knew I would love this, but I knew not how much. I start to laugh, sometimes, out loud. Little chuckles that drive the everyday, streetwise composure out of my face. Or it cringes (the composure does) with sudden bursts of pain, my facial muscles flooding with the multitude joys of sorrow or hubristic foreshadowing. People start turning their heads - or so I imagine. But they know nothing of the intricate pleasures that I derive, amongst them, out there in the streets. Out of my ears grow the headphones and, respectively, the wires that are firmly attached to my cell phone. Into my ears, in a very astute and mesmerizing manner, streams Donna Tartt's voice like a dream.

I certainly didn't expect this to happen. I thought it would be a very pleasant ride. Extraordinarily so, yes, but only compared to the vast amounts of ordinariness that surround and encompass everyday life. I fell in love again with this book, this novel, this masterpiece of storytelling. And with the author. It is one thing to love a book so much that you grab it off the bookshelf and start reading random passages out loud until you fall asleep. It is quite another to have it read to you by the author herself. The same author that wrote every single sentence of it and refined them so much that you won't find any flaws in them (except that one sentence on p.321, which goes: 'She was a good girl, a good sport.' Richard would never have said anything like this, maybe out of insecurity, a sly remark to Bunny, but he is not pressured in any way in this situation. But Donna makes you forget this one little inconsistency quite immediately when she goes on:

Sweet chuckles in the dark and her hair falling across my face, funny little catches in her breath like the girls in high school. The warm feel of a body in my arms was something I'd almost forgotten. How long since I'd kissed anyone that way? Months, and more months.

I signed up on audible.co.uk because they offer a free audiobook upon registration. Actually I was going for True Grit because it is the most expensive, if you can think of it that way, of the books read by Donna Tartt. But then I discovered that I am not allowed to download that one from an account - and with billing details - from Germany. Neither was I allowed to download The Little Friend - both audiobooks I wanted to listen to particularly because of Donna Tartt's Mississippi upbringing and native Southern voice.
So the only audiobook of interest that I got for free on sign-up was The Secret History - for personal implications in this novel see my last post. But what I didn't know then and despise of now is this: this audible accounts come with a catch! The files that you are allowed to download are heavy on DRM. To listen to them I have to have a special device, an Ipod or something like this - everything but an ordinary and well-functioning mp3-player - or, the other choice is to burn it to CDs with incoherent chapters that are all, equally, eight minutes long, making a total of about twenty CDs which I wouldn't need anyway, because I have no portable device to play them on.

[Here a little story is amiss that dealt with some things. I'd rather not tell you what it was.]

But one big benefit - [here too, something has been left out] - is that I grasped an understanding of the novel that I wouldn't have gained otherwise. Due to the constant concern about paragraph beginnings and endings I became aware of some aspects of the wider compositional structure of the text. The paragraphs, for example, quite often resemble Richard's state of mind, his level of consciousness. Many start with him waking up or coming to and end with him going to bed or going 'home', to his dorm or, at least, departing from his friends or passing out. The story gets a heavy dreamlike quality this way, as do Richards thoughts and the actions of the group, which Richard often reminisces as being incomprehensible to a rational mind like his own. Which is, of course, one of the main themes of the novel that oscillates between Greek madness and Roman rationality and Richard's "morbid longing" to present everything in a "picturesque" manner, "at all costs." It is also quite on par with Julian's assumption that another, and more precise, word for "psychology" is "fate." It is the underlying theme of classicism vs. modernism. This is the true reason why they had to kill Bunny, after all, to see how far they could push their classicist beliefs onto the modern world around them. How far they could go until the ancient Gods, the Greek Erinyes or Roman Furies "turned up the volume of [their] inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made [them] so much themselves that they couldn't stand it" anymore. And this is exactly what happens in Book II and this is also exactly why Richard remains utterly detached from all the events and the murders throughout the book and thus, ostensibly, stands the test of time. His utter self, his 'fatal flaw' is, as he rightly confesses in the first paragraph, "a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs." This is his madness, and it drives him to consider all the events in this (picturesque) light; drives him to tell us about it in his beautiful words, his beautiful narrative, to generate a morbidly picturesque story out of it. The storytelling is his madness, his obsession, the volume of his inner monologue turned way up so that it spills over onto the pages that we read, driving him "out of his mind" and into/onto the world. "This is the only story I will ever be able to tell."

Last night, when I brushed my teeth and made the usual mess out of spit-and-toothpaste splotches in the washbasin, I realized that one of those had taken the form of a rabbit, long ears and all. I first thought it was Bunny appearing before me, revealing himself to me in some kind of dental-hygiene omen. But before I could make out what he might have had to say I cut my gums with the toothbrush and a bright red drop of blood trickled down my lips, falling right onto the figure where it's eye would have been, rendering it a perfect Albino. Dizzyness washed over me with the boldness of this divine message. When I turned on the faucet and splashed cold water in my face, right before I closed my eyes to protect them from the liquid element about to hit, I saw the rabbit dissolving and tumbling down the drain, it's red eye glaring into mine. When I opened them again, the rabbit was gone. Are you ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?

Donna Tartt takes her time

Her debut novel The Secret History, published in 1992, is said to have taken her about 9 years to write. Her second novel, The Little Friend, came out in 2002. A third novel is said to be underway, publishing date seemingly somewhen in 2012. Between her novels, appearances are scarce. She has published less than a handful of short-stories in her career. The last thing published was an afterword to Charles Portis's True Grit, which she also narrated in the audio book version (both the novel and the afterword).

The Secret History was my first real literary love. (Wait, this is not true. The Catcher in the Rye preceded it and was a perennial companion through the early stages of my adolescence. I once gave it to a girlfriend hoping she would get a better, if not crystal-clear, understanding of the person that I was. I was 20 back then. It didn't make any sense to her. It was a long time before I read another novel.)
The Secret History falls well into the patterns that Salinger laid out for me. I discovered not only the beauty of written language but also what a perfectly crafted narrative could do. The novel still haunts me and only had to tie its #1 position when I discovered House of Leaves (both eventually lost it to Infinite Jest) a couple years ago. It was, after Catcher in the Rye, the first book that I would frequently draw from the bookshelf and start reading random passages out loud from. Sometimes I kept reading on for hours and way into the night before realizing that darkness had fallen around me. Its prologue is probably the piece of literature that I've read most often in my life. It still chills me to the bones. It starts:

"The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation."

And the situation is this: Richard and his new closely-knit circle of friends - eccentric and very reclusive classics majors at a prestigious New England Liberal Arts college; Richard always remains detached and an outsider to their minds, emotions, and actions - murder one of their own, Edmund "Bunny" Corcoran. Book I of The Secret History leads us from Richard's arrival at Hampden college and his integration into the group to their murder of Bunny. Book II is a painstaking examination of the psychological aftermath that the five of them have to deal with after the killing of their friend.

"I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell,"

closes the prologue and makes clear to everyone (who has skipped the book's motto's by Nietzsche and Plato) that this is also and foremost a story about storytelling itself. And for those who also skip prologues, Richard opens the first chapter:

"Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs."

And it is precisely this morbid longing for the picturesque that suffuses Richard's narration throughout the novel. A moi. L'histoire d'une de mes folies.

It was not until Tartt's second novel, The Little Friend, arrived on the scene and gathered some bad reviews - praising once more the brilliance of The Secret History - that I finally picked up her debut. And now, about nine years later, last week, I read The Little Friend. The reason I hadn't read it before was my conviction that it couldn't possibly surpass The Secret History in any way and why spoil my idolatry of Donna Tartt's writing, as some of the bitter reviewers did? But I see now clearly that she achieved pretty much what she set out for:

"After The Secret History I wanted to write a different kind of book on every single level [...] I wanted to take on a completely different set of technical problems. The Secret History was all from the point of view of Richard, a single camera, but the new book is symphonic, like War And Peace. That's widely thought to be the most difficult form."

I haven't read War and Peace, but I can see that The Little Friend is symphonic, and also a brilliant - and totally different from The Secret History - book. It starts out with a prologue in which we are told that nine year old Robin Cleve Dufresnes was murdered:

"He was hanging by the neck from a piece of rope, slung over a low branch of the black-tupelo that stood near the overgrown privet hedge between Charlotte's house and Mrs. Fountain's; and he was dead. The toes of his limp tennis shoes dangled six inches above the grass. The cat, Weenie, was sprawled barrel-legged on his stomach atop a branch, batting, with a deft, feinting paw, at Robin's copper-red hair, which ruffled and glinted in the breeze and which was the only thing about him that was the right color any more."

 As we are told,

"the Cleves loved to recount among themselves even the minor events of their family history - repeating word for word, with stylized narrative and rhetorical interruptions, entire death-bed scenes, or marriage proposals that had occured a hundred years before - the events of this terrible Mother's Day were never discussed [though]. They were not discussed even in covert groups of two, brought together by a long car trip or by insomnia in a late-night kitchen; and this was unusual, because these family discussions were how the Cleves made sense of the world."

And thus it comes that 12 years later, when the story sets in and no murderer has been found, twelve year old Harriet, Robin's sister, sets out to make her own sense of the murder against a wall of silence from her family. And here you can see, again right from the first page, that this novel is also about storytelling. And the story that it tells is not so much about the death of Robin or who the murderer is, but about a whole town, Alexandria in Mississippi, in the late 1970's, and the people that live - and die - in it. And it is about that one long, hot, idle Southern summer that changes everything. And because it's a long, hot summer for a twelve year old, the narration is also, well, not long and hot, but exuberant, invasive and spreading out like the kudzu - the vine that ate the South - that overgrows, and connects, so many places, and, metaphorically, people, in the novel. If you think plot, there are many loose ends. If you think characters, they are as three-dimensional as they get, even the two-dimensional ones.

Until her third novel arrives, I will pass the time listening to Tartt's great Southern voice, narrating The Secret History and The Little Friend herself, and, considering her True Grit essay I think I will start with her interpretation of Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn. I liked the book, the Coen movie not so much, but I'm pretty sure I will love Donna Tartt reading it out loud to me.