BOOK COLLECTOR

THE GOLDFINCH  By Donna Tartt Little Brown and Co. $30, 771 pages, 2013 Pulitzer Prize winner for Fiction A terrorist attack at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. One young survivor, Theodore Decker (Theo), disoriented from the blast, wanders among splayed bodies, scorched art, & the architectural detritus of the crumbling Met. Young Theo stumbles upon a dying man named Welty who--in his confusion or clairvoyance--urges Theo to take a painting, a ring, and a message to his business partner, James Hobart (Hobie).  So begins Donna Tartt’s pulitzer-prize winning novel & literary blockbuster,  The Goldfinch --the painting Theo absconds with to his E. 57th St. home where he expects to find his mom waiting for him. Unfortunately, Theo’s mother, Audrey, dies in the blast leaving him a quasi-orphan--alone with his trauma, his memories, his uncertainty toward the future, & his newly acquired, secret masterwork.  This titular painting reminds...

Hunger by Knut Hamson, Translated by Robert Bly Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008 (reprint), 243 pages, $16 Hunger 's external plot is inertial--man undergoes bouts of semi-self-inflicted starvation. In another way, the plot is cyclical--man wanders a town called Christiania, man writes or wants to write, man starves, eats, pukes, starves, eats again, (repeat). This by itself, as Hamsun undoubtedly knew, can seem redundant, even boring. That's why the main thrust of this prolonged "parable/allegory" resides in the main character's interiority--the dissonance between the protagonist's framed thoughts & actions and the reader's wider frame of the same circumstances. This is where typical stream-of-consciousness (SoC) shines--in the liminal zones between thought & behavior (think of our narrator's flamboyant bipolarity), between the narratorial unreliability and the authorial hints of "factuality".  Serendipitously, having just read...

The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya, Houghton Mifflin, 278 pages, 2003. Tolstaya's novel,  The Slynx, is a  smorgasbord of dark delights. No matter what angle a reader approaches this story, they'll find something provocative to confront & challenge their thinking about narrative, genre, & storytelling. Tolstaya teases out allusions to the Bolshevik Revolution and other slivers of Russian history, toys with linguistic evolution in a dyspotic future or  the “mutilation of language”; she shifts voices with disorienting effect and unleashes her titular "Slynx" as symbol of Existential Angst--among other things; she  employs  irony & farce with barbed ferocity as it's linked to memory & art. The novel also showcases the macabre “consequences” of  rigid class stratification & retrogressive bureaucracy, recurrent citations of Russian authors, & contemplations of philosophic themes like Censorship, Authority...