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Growing Old

Returned to reading The Goldfinch after a hiatus which included other books in between. These lines describing the narrator's father struck a familiar chord

Yet even in the midst of his new laid-backness he still had that crazed and slightly heroic look of schoolboy insolence, all the more stirring since it was drifting towards autumn, half-ruined and careless of itself.

Theo, the narrator describes his father after they have moved to Las Vegas. The father had been alcoholic, abusive and left him and his mother. After his mother's sudden death, the father and his girlfriend bring Theo into their lives. These lines speak to the changes that Theo observes in his father since he last saw him. 

As I read this, could not help thinking of a few people I have known in my life who simply failed to mellow with age and turned caricatures of their younger selves. Age had failed to give them grace and yet took away the only redeeming quality of youth - exuberance. The author describes something akin to this transition very beautifully.

Then towards the end of the book where Theo is reunited with the painting, the author describes that moment in a way that transcends the character and his rather unique circumstances

And as the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological static just as random as the street lamps flashing past.

To me this book is one of the few novels I have read recently all the way to the end. The quality of the writing was very uneven to my taste, the cast of characters too diverse and not always relevant to the main plot-line. The whole production leaves the reader with the feeling that the author was angling for a movie deal out of the book - the signs of made for Hollywood are all over the place. Yet, the dis-balanced pacing and the entangled story-lines would make for a weary movie as it apparently has. There was some value in persisting with the book - as there were a few gems to be found. 



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