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Well the Prose is OK. I guess.
I wanted to grasp the supposed magic of reading this book, but I forced myself through in the vain hope it would get better. The only remotely interesting character is Bunny, and he is only mildly engaging. The plot is so loosley organized that many times I forgot the point of the whole story. This was my first and last Donna Tartt book.
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Has this or will it become a classic?
THE SECRET HISTORY is Donna Tartt's first book, apparently written while she was still in school. If you read it, you'll see why this is so hard to believe. The writer seems to be a master, an old pro. Some readers have even said it is or will be a classic. Richard is a Californian who has come to a small college in Vermont, where he studies Greek in a class with five other students, Harry, Francis, twins Charles and Camilla (I still don't know what to think of those two name choices), and Bunny (a male nickname). Richard becomes close with them, so close it is to the exclusion of all others, too close. Their story involves a murder, which leads to another murder, which leads to a suicide. This is a book you might want to reread. You might wonder if you caught every detail or missed an allusion. I never reread books, but this one I might.
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I love this book!
Donna Tartt is undeniably one of the three or four best American fiction writers, and this is certainly her best book. It's not really a Romance, more a book about coming of age in the dark of our complex world. It is very romantic, in the literary sense of that word.I can't recommend it highly enough.
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i had such high hopes for this cult classic
How can a novel have such an exciting plot (a cocooned academic world, a group of friends, everything that falls apart because of a murder, etc.) but turn out to have such a boring execution? I loved the overall plot, but absolutely hated the characters. It's not even that no one is remotely likable, but that no one seems to be a fully developed one at all. The only one who seems to have any sort of personality is the doomed Bunny, and everyone else is interchangeable. There's no sense of a buildup in the bloated narrative, everything reads like a very loosely connected series of vignettes. Characters have a walk, have extensive monologues about classical themes (so many info dumps, so so many...), have drinks, argue amongst themselves. None of the characters seem to react in any way to any of their crimes (the murder of the farmer, of Bunny, of several animals, etc). They seem to shrug and wave it off, and talk it away as something merely troublesome. Even at the very end, none of them seem to care very much. The dark academia reputation of The Secret History is highly exaggerated. The school is a minor presence in the actual plot (it adds nothing to the investigation/coverup/the main conflict), and the enigmatic teacher at the center of the friend group (Julian) hangs around mostly in the background. The novel could have been edited down to a very solid 300 page or so book, and would have been so much better. There are some moments where the writing is beautiful and impactful, bring across real emotions and feelings, but for the majority of the book's length it reads as awkward and pretentious: "...opportunities which I would seize, gently but manfully, as exordium to more violent pleasures."
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DONNA ATE
Okay, the aspect of an unreliable narrator has always been interesting to me. In this book, you see everyone and everything as a recollection of the narrator's memories, hence the "history" part. This shows characters that seem to be good when they're really just bits and pieces of what they used to be. This book immediately hooked me, and now I understand the hype. I've read The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, and it is one of my favorite books. The Secret History will be added to that list.
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Masterpiece.
Donna Tartt ate this up
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One of my favorite books to date!
I still think about this book all the time. So beautifully written and slightly haunting. Will never stop recommending this to anyone!!!
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Feast or Famine
When I picked this book up off my bookshelf, I somehow missed the part that said psychological thriller. That's okay because this book gave dark, psychological vibes right away. I do not know how Tartt did it, perhaps the short introduction was all it took, but I was instantly drawn into the story she wrote. The aspect that captivated me the most was watching the narrator believe he was piecing the puzzle pieces of life around him together when, in reality, he was the puzzle piece of a larger plan already in place. How large a plan depends on your thoughts of what went down; as for me, I got caught up in the game with the narrator. I would absolutely recommend this to anyone who loves dark academia presented as a psychological thriller!
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