As tempting as it is I don't believe that reading a book changes a life. I do believe that great books lead to an accumulation of small alterations which further develops a, thinking-self. This is a self, in Svenn Birketts article in a past issue of the American Scholar, that exists parallel but apart from the self that is goal-oriented and copes with the world. This other self is inward, reflective, contemplative, associative and devoid of goals. It exists for and within itself. It leads us to face and explore the burden of the self rather than flee to conformity and acceptance, groups and organizations we can safely huddle within as members, religions and philosophies where we can gain a name, a stance, a conjured identity.It is this interior life that I strive for and this book has added its small but significant alteration. It accomplishes this with no bravado or bows. It employs the beauty of language not trying to be beautiful. The book has no need. It knows its own breadth. The first person narrator is Tartt's genius. She set her camera lens at the precise distance for this meaningful story to be told. Without ever notifying us she resets the delicate lens as she allows the young narrator to mature and develop. She is so quiet and confident.Early in the book she let's us know what it is to be about, so it will not be a spoiler for me to reveal it in this review. The narrator coming from a dull town in California attends a small private college in Vermont. He signs up for Greek, his fallback, not knowing what else to do. He finds himself joining a group of five other students, four boys and one girl, who have been together for some time. All their classes will be taught by a professor considered peculiar by the rest of the faculty but is kept on because of his years served and his not accepting pay for his teaching. The administration is inept and little oversight is provided. There was for me the thrill of intense study, research, the gain of knowledge and promise if wisdom. Julian the professor, "...was a marvelous talker, a magical talker...". When filling out a review of him later one of the students complained how difficult to explain on a form since they were in the presence of the, "Divine."During one of the first Greek classes Julian lectures, "All truly civilized people-the ancients no less than us-have civilized themselves through the willful repression of the old, animal self. Are we, in this room,really very different from the Greeks or the Romans? Obsessed with duty, piety, loyalty, sacrifice? All those things which are to modern tastes so chilling." A few lines further, "And it's a temptation for any intelligent person, and especially for perfectionists such as the ancients and ourselves, to try to murder the primitive emotive, appetitive self. But that is a mistake." Further, "The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he's worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely." He offers the ancient Greeks as a solution; "To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn." At the beginning of one class he announces, "I hope we are all ready to leave the phenomenal world and enter into the sublime."The heightened writing leads to heightened tension as each character lives a consuming trail of self evasion through endless bottles of alcohol and pills, swallowed and popped during all times of day and night. Tartt must have partied herself because she got it right. How would I know...that's for another review. The abundance is obsessive. They have removed themselves from their self, from reality by existing in a cover of fog. It is furthered by taking on false roles, delving into the costumery of condescension and acts of class privilege. Their immersion into study, reading, academics, serves as another role to evade the burden of the self-a tricky proposition since I am reading about reading being an evasion of the self. They are lost as a mystery builds within the story. This is a true suspenseful mystery where I could not put down the book. I had to find out what happened next. The magic was that the mystery was not tacked on as a twin billing. Seamlessly, it emanated from the story. Form and content, art carefully but appearing effortlessly stitched together.So, yes there was from this exceptional book a small alteration leading to a further accumulation of such alterations resulting in the further richness of my inner life. That is as much if not more than I can ask for.
The first paragraph of The Secret History roughly sums up the mood of the book. In it, the narrator, Richard Papen, says that he thinks his fatal flaw is 'a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs'. If you can relate to these words, chances are you'll love The Secret History. If not, you'll probably wonder what the fuss is all about. Personally, I can totally relate to these words, so I love the book. I've read it over half a dozen times, and while I do think it has its problems, I never fail to find it utterly gripping.The Secret History is both an intellectual novel of ideas and a murder mystery without the whodunnit element. The reader learns right on the first page that Richard and his friends have killed one among their midst. The rest of the book goes on to explain how they came to their gruesome deed and what happened to them afterwards. Against all odds, it makes for compelling reading, despite the fact that you know right from the start who the killers are. Such is the power of Tartt's writing that you find yourself turning page after page, waiting for answers, justifications and possibly a sign of remorse. Once these have been dealt with, the book loses a bit of its power, but until that time, it's near perfect.Donna Tartt's great gift as a writer is her magnificent talent for description. Her evocation of life at a small private university in New England with its oddball mix of ivory-tower intellectuals and ditzy cokeheads is rich in detail, both shocking and funny. If it's not entirely realistic, she makes it so. Likewise, her skill at characterisation is superb. While Richard is not entirely convincing as a male narrator (a fact I find more noticeable every time I re-read the book), he and his friends make up a fascinating cast of characters: six aloof, self-absorbed and arrogant intellectuals who are obsessed with ancient Greece and don't particularly care for modern life. They're snobs and they have major issues, but somehow that only makes them more alluring. Together, they form the ultimate inner circle, the kind of tight-knit group you know should always stay together. Which makes it almost understandable that they should be willing to kill anyone who might jeopardise that group dynamic, incomprehensible though this may seem to the average reader.I can think of many reasons why The Secret History strikes such a chord with me. For one thing, I have a thing for timeless and ethereal stories, and this is one of those. Somehow the book has a dreamlike, almost hypnotic quality, despite it being very firmly set in the rather unromantic 1980s. I love that. For another thing, I have always been drawn to the unabashedly intellectual, and this book has that in spades. It makes geekdom alluring, and I just love Tartt for that. I wish I were as geeky as Henry!Ultimately, what I think I respond to most in The Secret History is the friendship aspect. The Secret History is very much a book about friendship. It's about the very human yearning to belong and be accepted by people we admire. It's about the sacrifices we make to keep friendships intact, the insecurity we feel when we think we might not be completely accepted by our friends after all, and the paranoia we experience when it seems our friends may have betrayed us. About the feeling of invincibility we get from having great friends, and the melancholy and loneliness that follow the disintegration of a once-great friendship. The book basically reads like an elegy on a great friendship, and one doesn't necessarily have to share Richard's intellectual attitude towards life, his morality or even his morbid longing for the picturesque to be able to relate to that. It's enough to have yearned for close friendship and been insecure in friendship. And let's face it, who hasn't?I do not think The Secret History is a perfect book. As I said, I find Richard somewhat unconvincing as a male character; there is too much about him that screams 'female author' to me. Furthermore, the ending is decidedly weak, although to be fair, I have no idea how else Tartt could have finished her book. The story does seem to be inexorably heading in that particular direction. Insofar as the ending reflects the disintegration that is going on in the characters' lives, it could probably be said to be appropriate. Still, I wish Tartt could have come up with something on a par with the rest of the book. If she had, this would have been a six-star book. I don't know many of those.
What do You think about The Secret History (2004)?
This book will linger in my memory for a long time. I was nearly finished with it last night, and found myself awake thinking not only about how it will end, but about several of the scenes and how they come together in the end. The author wrote this book masterfully and I found myself completely immersed in the story and the characters.The plot moves slowly, but it has so much depth and complexity it needs to. I read this book after Tartt's The Little Friend (despite the lower reviews), and I am glad I did. This book is so well crafted I probably would've been tempted to score The Little friend lower simply because my expectations going into it would've been much higher.The author is able to effectively recreate the mood and atmosphere of a group of people that discover what it really means to kill someone, the aftermath, and the consequences of truly transforming their consciousness into a way of thinking that vanished with the classic era. The superimposition of this world view imposed on modern seekers of the ancient classic culture, and the plot twists and turns that are a direct result of this blend, are intricately woven as the story reveals itself layer by layer.The characters are realistic, believable, and never what they seem. Throughout the story the author wraps up loose ends neatly, moving from section to section in a systematic fashion. The ending of the story is complete and satisfying as was the entire book.Highly recommended for patient and thoughtful readers.
—Gary
At the transition from the first to second half of the story, marked by a FIFTY-PAGE reveal in a single monologue by a character who's defining trait is his inscrutable lack of emotion, the reader discovers that things aren't what they seem. Unfortunately, the second half's hook is that things are exactly what they seem: these kids believe every action oozes the portent of Oedipus at the Oracle when, in fact, the world is humming along without paying them the least mind. While that may be the point, these kids effect this classicism gone haywire by drinking and screaming about how scared they are after knocking on each other's doors in the middle of the night. Round about the fifteenth "there was a knock at the door. it was XXX" I was ready to knock on the door of my septic tank, but decided to keep going to see about a climax...which never really comes. A supposedly grotesque sexual relationship is handled dismissively and without consequences, themes of flight from self are never really fulfilled (despite the fact that losing oneself is the goal of every adolsecent), and eventually you realize that you want to escape these characters as much as they want to escape themselves. Unfortunately, neither of you can. In addition to being completely unlikeable and filled with incomprehensible motivations, there is simply no way these characters would be friends with each other, no way a dim dyslexic kleptomaniac extorionist jock would be accepted into an advanced classics program, and if you can tell the difference between Francis and Charles, other than one is gay and the other isn't, do let me know.
—Brian Calandra
The expectations for this book couldn't have been higher (I had almost exclusively read raving reviews) and for the first time ever, I wasn't disappointed! The "hype" is definitely justified. It was exactly what I expected in some ways, and completely different in others. I enjoyed this book immensely, even though I was stuck in some sort of "dilemma" while reading: The writing was impeccable and made me want to savor and appreciate every single sentence, but the storyline was so gripping that I also wanted to read as fast as I could. I chose the latter, and read it a lot faster than I thought I would and overall, it didn't feel like a 600 page book at all. Even though the second half of the book had some slow parts, it didn't lessen my reading experience and the characters and their development always made me eager to continue. They were all multi-dimensional, deeply flawed and each in their own ways pretty much insane people and I loved reading about them!There's nothing more to say, other than that I highly recommend this book and can't wait to read Donna Tartt's other writings.
—Lotte
