The goldfinch

Well, it's a good novel. Probably not a great one, but a far worthier follow-up to The Secret History than the mediocre The Little Friend. A boy orphaned after a terrorist attack at the Metropolitan Museum is thrown into a 21st-century Dickens tale, drifting from well-meaning but busy foster parents to various crooks and gamblers, all the while unable to tell anyone that when he woke up in the rubble of the Dutch Masters wing, bleeding and in shock, he for some unfathomable reason stuck the titular 17th century priceless masterpiece in his bag and has been keeping it ever since... While the story could have done with a bit of tightening up, as there's really very little plot as such, I blazed through all 800 pages of it in under a week and enjoyed the whole ride, both the portrait of upper-class Manhattanites clashing with struggling Russian immigrants and of the underlying question of just WHY he must hold on to a piece of art that he can never show to anyone. Tartt's good at balancing characters and the way they're unknowingly trapped by the story they create for themselves; Greek tragedy in TSH, Dickensian-DeLilloan bildungsroman here. Not great, but quite good.

I wish I could say the same for the translator, though. The Swedish translation is a complete hatchet job, rushed out to compete with the original, and if I didn't have to write a review specifically of the Swedish edition I would have tossed it aside the second the translator mistakes "Native American" for "domestic". And that's far from the worst example. So that's **** for the original, ** for the translation.