Re-reading

I remember the exact moment I knew I was hooked by Donna Tartt’s 864-page novel, The Goldfinch. It was the first line of the second chapter: “Things would have turned out better if she had lived.”

What a gut-punch of a line. My curiousity had been vaguely piqued by the first chapter, where an American man, Theo, is holed up in a hotel room in Amsterdam for mysterious reasons:

“The Herald Tribune had no news of my predicament but the story was all over the Dutch papers, dense blocks of foreign print which hung, tantalizingly, just beyond the reach of my comprehension.”

Tantalizing is a good word for that first chapter. It’s a taste of something interesting, both in style and content. But it wasn’t until the second chapter that I was truly hungry to know what happened.

I was reading on an eReader, where you never fully appreciate how many pages anything is. I remember doing a double-take when I finally glanced down at the page count (I tend to bump up the font size on eReader books, so it was something like page 10 of 1273). About a quarter of the way through the book, the story took a turn I wasn’t expecting and, as much as I knew the guy had to end up in some kind of trouble, it was agonizing watching him get there. Somewhere around page 900 on my eReader, I remember thinking, “I’m never going to read this again”.

So here I am, re-reading The Goldfinch.

I borrowed a physical copy from the library this time, immediately an improvement on the experience. I like the sensation of pages turning and the slow transfer of weight from one side of the spine to the other. Also, Carel Fabritius’ Goldfinch painting is a key feature of the story and there’s a picture of it on the inside cover of the book. I keep flipping back to it to remind myself what it looks like.

I’ve been struck by how completely my memory drops off a cliff after the story moves to Las Vegas. I had been completely invested in the world that was unfolding in New York: this elegant but strained family home environment he lands in after his mother dies, visits to a kind and skilled antique furniture restorer, kinship with a young girl whose life was also blown apart by the tragic, traumatic event...

Above all, I loved descriptions of the antique furniture shop, Hobart and Blackwell.

“A wilderness of gilt, gleaming in the slant from the dust-furred windows, gilded cupids, gilded commodes, and torchieres, and—undercutting the old-wood-smell—the reek of turpentine, oil paint, and varnish.”

“[T]he workshop was so rich and magical: a treasure cave, bigger on the inside than it looked on the outside, with the light filtering down from the high windows, fretwork and filigree, mysterious tools I didn’t know the names of, and the sharp, intriguing smells of varnish and beeswax. Even the chair he’d been working on—which had goat’s legs in front, with cloven hooves—had seemed less like a piece of furniture than a creature under enchantment, like it might up-end itself and hop down from his work bench and trot away down the street.”

“After school, amidst the drowsy tick of the tall-case clocks, he taught me the pore and luster of different woods, their colors, the ripple and gloss of tiger maple and the frothed grain of burled walnut, their weights in my hand and even their different scents—“sometimes, when you’re not sure what you have, it’s easiest just to take a sniff”—spicy mahogany, dusty-smelling oak, black cherry with its characteristic tang and the flowery, amber-resin smell of rosewood.”

In a much shorter, less critically acclaimed novel that exists in some parallel universe, Theo learns to deal with his grief while apprenticing full-time at Hobart and Blackwell. That was the novel I wanted to read, anyway—an exquisitely detailed journey into the healing world of antique restoration. I shut out pretty much everything that happened after Theo was forced to move to Vegas with his alcoholic, gambling-addicted father. I mean, I remember Boris (who could forget Boris?), but I genuinely have no idea what happens in the last half of this story. I already read it! How has the most basic outline of that information failed to stick?

I’m on page 446 of the re-read (he’s back in New York! Hurray!) and I think I’m able to appreciate things more now that I’m not fighting what actually happens with the version I was hoping for the first time around. In any case, I got to relive the joy of what I loved in those first 200 pages, which was a thrill.

Re-reading always tells me more about myself than the book. It’s rare that I can recapture the magic of something I loved the first time around. Too often it falls flat or rings hollow. You see the man behind the curtain and Oz isn’t so great or powerful anymore. There’s a sense of grief in those moments for me, recognition of a more credulous, sentimental past self that no longer exists. Sometimes that feels like growth and other times, cynicism. Whatever new insights or emotions I experience, I only know one thing for certain: the book hasn’t changed.