The Secret History by Donna Tartt Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $7.49 You Save: $8.51 (53%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $1.36 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of The Secret History
Book Review: Engrossing
Summary: 5 Stars
I absolutely adored Tartt's other novel, The Little Friend, and I had high hopes for this one too. I was not disappointed. The novel tells the story of five students at an elite New England liberal arts college. All of the students are tremendously, unusually devoted to their studies, and this devotion leads them to tragedy as they murder first, an outsider, and then one of their own. The fact of the murders is not the suspenseful part of the plot. Indeed, the murder of one of the group's own is revealed on the first page. Rather, the interest, intruige, and suspense comes in how the students cope with the knowledge of what they've done. Their suspicion, fear, and even some remorse wreak havoc and lead the group to an even more tragic climax. The main characters in this book are Classics students, and indeed, the book itself reads much like a Greek tragedy, with precipitous decline, and knowledge thereof.
Donna Tartt is a phenomenal storyteller. She creates plots that are deep, rich, and complex. Much like The Little Friend, The Secret History is a highly psychological book. I was absolutely gripped by this book from beginning to end.
Book Review: Enjoyable and FUN but unresolved...
Summary: 4 Stars
I enjoyed this book very much....
it had a great feel to it...
i loved the story....
there are some parts of it left unexplained....
espcially the KEY TURNING point in the story isnt even disccussed thoroughly....
anyways its a simple story....
nothing extraordinary here...
but still its the writing tht makes it more than wht it really is....
Recommended!!!
Book Review: Erudite, stylistic, but in the end not credible and boring.
Summary: 2 Stars
Agree with earlier reviews that said characters are one-dimensional and 'cartoon-y'. No emotional investment created in the narrator. I'm generally dubious of female authors writing male main characters and vice versa, and the reason for that is born out here - the main character comes off, if not feminine, a bit asexual, further damaging his believability. Too much style, not enough substance.Book Review: Excellent book!
Summary: 5 Stars
I can't say enough good things about this book. Excellent characters, incredibly well written descriptions of everything, well researched, and very fascinating and intense. Tartt has great skill particulalrly with written descriptions of almost anything, and they are so vivid you actually will see them as you read, which is nice. I recommend this book to anyone who likes a good story and good characters.Book Review: Excellent literary fiction, seriously flawed.
Summary: 4 Stars
I come away from this book at a loss as to what to say about it: It deserves both high praise and heavy criticism. It is a rapturous, beautiful, intricate and balanced work of art; it is also oddly archaic, strangely disconnected from reality, and oftentimes more dissolute than well-worked.
In praise, its insight into the kind of effete degeneracy that seems to well up when one isolates maturing intellectuals with one another is chillingly apt: It is apt, however, more in the sense of metaphor than in any naturalistic sense. The romance, luxuriousness, and cruel beauty of the cultivated degeneracy Tartt takes as her theme is evoked with brilliance and not inconsiderable talent.
In way of criticism, however, the novel is long and hangs loosely on its frame; its narrator, a character standing halfway between the position of a blank-slate observer and a character in his own right, vacillates between transparency and muddiness, his gestures toward the development of a personality alternatingly muddy and tragic, and this narratorial shapelessness contributes to the baggy-monsterness of the text as a whole.
Though it is easy to identify the themes of the work in broad strokes, I come away from an attentive reading of the text without being able to put my finger on its moral center, which is, I think, a flaw in Tartt's writing, not an element of her design; _The Secret History_ works very hard to achieve a sense of this moral center, and it is a very grave and wise one, at that; but it fails to alight on it definitively. The novel does not easily settle into the sum of its parts.
A very unsettling element of this book is the weird timelessness of its setting: I had to guess continuously when it might have been set, my first guess being the sixties, then gradually moving up through the decades as bits of background information trickled through the text. As nearly as I can tell, it takes place in the eighties--a time during which students use typewriters and rely on pay phones, but contextually after the sixties and seventies. Being the eighties, however, virtually every character speaks in his own bizarrely archaic voice: Bunny sounds like a hybrid of Teddy Roosevelt and Gatsby; Francis like a Victorian effeminate; and the unflattering peripheral characters like technicolor Californians or oddly outdated cokeheads. I can't determine whether this is an element of its structure or a flaw.
Finally, as a Classicist myself I came away with the uncertain suspicion that Tartt does not actually herself possess any classical languages. Virtually every instance of Greek in the text is orthographically wrong in some way; for instance I saw a lambda mysteriously mistyped as a gamma, that is, flipped upside down in the transcription process (it caused the word to read "pogyeides" not "polyeides"); and when the diacritical marks aren't wrong, they're lacking. These quibbles aside, it may well be that we ought to blame the typesetter, not the author, because Tartt's use of classical material in the text is unwaveringly appropriate and often quite erudite.
Despite its flaws, the book is intoxicating: I took a long shower the day I finished it, when I was about halfway through; I didn't realize until halfway through the thirty-minute soak that I was lingering because I actually felt _infected_ by the guilt of Tartt's characters, that my immersion in this book had made me uncleanly complicit to their crimes, their dread. This little work of sympathetic magic on her part is a testament to the intellectual and moral impact of her text, and, I think, excuses in itself the flaws one may point out in it; it is, moreover, beautifully written and unflaggingly rich. This book may never be a classic, but it is without a doubt fiction of literary merit.