Cross-cultural communication （109）　

109) Donna Tartt's Unknown Worldview
I started reading Donna Tartt's Gold Finch in the autumn of 2018 in English, as it was recommended by Haruki Murakami as a contemporary American writer. It is an 800-page paperback, but I managed to read it all the way through without ever giving up. I work as a doctor 6 days a week, and I read French novels in my spare time. So I decided that the only time I would be able to read Donna's novel would be the 30 minutes I spent eating in at a Family Mart before work at the nursing home. Therefore, it took me about four months to finish reading it. However, those 30 minutes in the morning were a precious time for me.

Theo is a high school student whose beautiful mother is killed in a terrorist bombing at a museum in New York. Theo, who was with his mother at the scene of the incident, is also injured, but survives. At that time, he happens to snatch up a famous painting, “The Goldfinch”, which was blown into the hallway by the explosion. Theo's father, who had been living separately, takes Theo back and they move to Las Vegas, where he is living with his mistress, but his best friend at high school in Vegas is Boris, a Russian immigrant. Boris is, to put it nicely, unfazed and natural in everything he does, but to put it unkindly, he is extremely lazy. He is a character who is very similar to a Russian-Jewish medical resident who was one of my friends when I was a medical resident in Brooklyn in the 1980s. Boris also shows an interest in this classic painting. Boris grows up to become a boss in the underworld, and he works in the shadows in the US and Europe, but he also meets up with Theo again, and there are various developments surrounding the Goldfinch. This is a work that I definitely recommend to readers of this blog who are interested in “cross-cultural communication”. Please read the original work. The Japanese translation is more than three times the price of the original work, and it doesn't seem to be very well received.

Inspired by The Goldfinch, the next book I read was The Secret History by the same author. At first, this work didn't really move me and I found it a bit boring, and when I had read about 20% of the book, I thought about giving up. However, from around the 30% mark, it became more and more interesting, and I read the whole book to the end. It depicts an incident that occurred at a liberal arts college in the countryside of the United States. The main character's chosen class is a class studying classical literature in Greek and Latin. Reading this book, I learned for the first time that there are such universities in the United States.

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