B-Log

The Bullfinch Donna Tartt 2014 Abacus After two false starts, I am done with The Bullfinch, the 2014 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction. The rather voluminous, in fact 864 pages in the paperback edition, book yielded to me when I was tuck with a digital disconnect for a period of four days. That did the trick. Though a good work, somehow, I felt, it called for an enforced freeze of some kind so that time will yield to it. Perhaps that summarises what I consider to be the problem with the book too. It is a good novel with sloughs of despondency and isles of enchantment, more isles and less the ponds of depression. The reader, like Bunyan's Christian, can progress in his pilgrimage after fighting off a series of temptations, which includes the not so charitable urge to put it down and move off! It was hard to agree with all the eulogies the blurb heaped on it, but equally painful not to, at times. The narrative with its epic sweep revolves around the  life of Theodore Decker,