Genre Fiction
![Donna Tartt - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B000APY632.jpg)
The Secret History
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A contemporary literary classic and "an accomplished psychological thriller ... absolutely chilling" (Village Voice), from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Goldfinch.
Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and forever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill.
Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and forever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill.
Editorial Reviews
"The Secret History succeeds magnificently. . . . A remarkably powerful novel [and] a ferociously well-paced entertainment. . . . Forceful, cerebral, and impeccably controlled." --The New York Times
"An accomplished psychological thriller .... Absolutely chilling .... Tartt has a stunning command of the lyrical." -The Village Voice
"Beautifully written, suspenseful from start to finish." -Vogue
"A haunting, compelling, and brilliant piece of fiction .... Packed with literary allusion and told with a sophistication and texture that owes much more to the nineteenth century than to the twentieth." -The Times (London)
"Her writing bewitches us .... The Secret History is a wonderfully beguiling book, a journey backward to the fierce and heady friendships of our school days, when all of us believed in our power to conjure up divinity and to be forgiven any sin." -The Philadephia Inquirer
"A huge, mesmerizing, galloping read, pleasurably devoured .... Gorgeously written, relentlessly erudite." –Vanity Fair
"An accomplished psychological thriller .... Absolutely chilling .... Tartt has a stunning command of the lyrical." -The Village Voice
"Beautifully written, suspenseful from start to finish." -Vogue
"A haunting, compelling, and brilliant piece of fiction .... Packed with literary allusion and told with a sophistication and texture that owes much more to the nineteenth century than to the twentieth." -The Times (London)
"Her writing bewitches us .... The Secret History is a wonderfully beguiling book, a journey backward to the fierce and heady friendships of our school days, when all of us believed in our power to conjure up divinity and to be forgiven any sin." -The Philadephia Inquirer
"A huge, mesmerizing, galloping read, pleasurably devoured .... Gorgeously written, relentlessly erudite." –Vanity Fair
Readers Top Reviews
Londongirl
This book was far too long. I couldn’t relate to the characters and it just lacks something. I wouldn’t describe it as a thriller. I almost gave up but did finish it begrudgingly. I kept hoping there’d be a big twist but *spoiler alert* there wasn’t. I had read The Little Friend and, although also very long winded, really enjoyed it. Oh well. Don’t think I’ll be reading another Donna Tartt book anytime soon. The reason I still have three stars is she is a good writer in so many ways. The ways she describes even the mundane is amazing. Just a shame she describes the mundane so often 😫
CharlotteJulieLon
I hated this book. I read to the end as I wanted to find out what the outcome was, and all the good reviews of it had me hoping against hope that it could turn around. It doesn't. This book is extremely dull; very little actually happens, the characters are caricatures of either American college kids or Classics scholars, and the whole story could have been wrapped-up in about a third of the time it takes to read it.
Mr. M. WalshRebek
Here's my review: the epilogue felt earnt. This was because the book felt so very bloody long. It's not a bad book - but it's pretty anemic fare when you look closely. You'd think that ancient Greek would provide a charming and interesting motif. You'd be wrong. Like most of the book, it's thin set dressing for a medium-interesting melodrama that doesn't really go anywhere. It's nicely written, but not so much as to ever make you stop and marvel. The characters are strangely thin. The plot seems poised to set them up as being profound, but then fumbles it. I did wonder if this was a thematic point, but I don't really think so, on reflection. The characterisation is also somewhat....bloodless. Again, I don't really this was deliberate *enough*. Meaning: I think it was deliberate, but serves no overarching purpose, like you'd hope. It's fine. I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend it.
JoEatsFoodandStuf
This won't be one of my typical 3-star reviews. To start, the writing is gorgeous and so dreamy. None of the scenes seem fully grounded, kind of as if Tartt is guiding the reader through the confusing haze Richard remembers of his college years. A California boy with dreams of studying ancient Greek, Richard goes to Hampden College in New England and it's all Greek to him until his entire friend group slowly starts unraveling. I love that the book opens with a murder because Richard starts off as a bit of a Holden Caulfield and the first half of the book just drags. None of the characters were remotely likable and, in the strangest way, I feel like I had met them all in college. They were pretentious and hyper-intellectual, but overall disasters. The poor pacing gives this first half 2 stars out of five. Then the second half starts and my enjoyment sky-rocketed. The characters don't get any more likable, but at least they get interesting. The entire fabric of Richard's reality starts falling apart. Secrets pop up and each influence in his life develops several extra dimensions. I particularly am fascinated by the charismatic Henry and the cowardly Francis. They were so fleshed out, even though Henry only allowed small glimpses of their true personalities. One of my biggest complaints was the sense of pacing. Sequences that lasted weeks, took a matter of paragraphs while entire hours lasted for pages. I kind of got the effect of adding tension in that way, but it wasn't for me. Ultimately, some really devious characters and interesting exploration on the effect trauma has on people's perception. I'm not sure this book was for me, but I am glad I read it.
Short Excerpt Teaser
PROLOGUE
THE SNOW in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. He'd been dead for ten days before they found him, you know. It was one of the biggest manhunts in Vermont history-state troopers, the FBI, even an army helicopter; the college closed, the dye factory in Hampden shut down, people coming from New Hampshire, upstate New York, as far away as Boston.
It is difficult to believe that Henry's modest plan could have worked so well despite these unforeseen events. We hadn't intended to hide the body where it couldn't be found. In fact, we hadn't hidden it at all but had simply left it where it fell in hopes that some luckless passer-by would stumble over it before anyone even noticed he was missing. This was a tale that told itself simply and well: the loose rocks, the body at the bottom of the ravine with a clean break in the neck, and the muddy skidmarks of dug-in heels pointing the way down; a hiking accident, no more, no less, and it might have been left at that, at quiet tears and a small funeral, had it not been for the snow that fell that night; it covered him without a trace, and ten days later, when the thaw finally came, the state troopers and the FBI and the searchers from the town all saw that they had been walking back and forth over his body until the snow above it was packed down like ice.
*
It is difficult to believe that such an uproar took place over an act for which I was partially responsible, even more difficult to believe I could have walked through it-the cameras, the uniforms, the black crowds sprinkled over Mount Cataract like ants in a sugar bowl-without incurring a blink of suspicion. But walking through it all was one thing; walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite another, and though once I thought I had left that ravine forever on an April afternoon long ago, now I am not so sure. Now the searchers have departed, and life has grown quiet around me, I have come to realize that while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the time: up at the top by the muddy wheel-ruts in the new grass, where the sky is dark over the shivering apple blossoms and the first chill of the snow that will fall that night is already in the air.
What are you doing up here? said Bunny, surprised, when he found the four of us waiting for him.
Why, looking for new ferns, said Henry.
And after we stood whispering in the underbrush-one last look at the body and a last look round, no dropped keys, lost glasses, everybody got everything?-and then started single file through the woods, I took one glance back through the saplings that leapt to close the path behind me. Though I remember the walk back and the first lonely flakes of snow that came drifting through the pines, remember piling gratefully into the car and starting down the road like a family on vacation, with Henry driving clench-jawed through the potholes and the rest of us leaning over the seats and talking like children, though I remember only too well the long terrible night that lay ahead and the long terrible days and nights that followed, I have only to glance over my shoulder for all those years to drop away and I see it behind me again, the ravine, rising all green and black through the saplings, a picture that will never leave me.
I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.
BOOK I
CHAPTER 1
DOES SUCH a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.
A moi. L'histoire d'une de mes folies.
My name is Richard Papen. I am twenty-eight years old and I had never seen New England or Hampden College until I was nineteen. I am a Californian by birth and also, I have recently discovered, by nature. The last is something I admit only now, after the fact. Not that it matters.
I grew up in Plano, a small silicon village in the north. No sisters, no brothers. My father ran a gas station and my mother stayed at home until I got older and times got tighter and she went to work, answering phones in the office of one of the big chip factories outside San Jose.
Plano. The word conjures up drive-ins, tract homes, waves of heat rising from the blacktop. My years there created for me an expendable past, disposable as a plastic cu...
THE SNOW in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. He'd been dead for ten days before they found him, you know. It was one of the biggest manhunts in Vermont history-state troopers, the FBI, even an army helicopter; the college closed, the dye factory in Hampden shut down, people coming from New Hampshire, upstate New York, as far away as Boston.
It is difficult to believe that Henry's modest plan could have worked so well despite these unforeseen events. We hadn't intended to hide the body where it couldn't be found. In fact, we hadn't hidden it at all but had simply left it where it fell in hopes that some luckless passer-by would stumble over it before anyone even noticed he was missing. This was a tale that told itself simply and well: the loose rocks, the body at the bottom of the ravine with a clean break in the neck, and the muddy skidmarks of dug-in heels pointing the way down; a hiking accident, no more, no less, and it might have been left at that, at quiet tears and a small funeral, had it not been for the snow that fell that night; it covered him without a trace, and ten days later, when the thaw finally came, the state troopers and the FBI and the searchers from the town all saw that they had been walking back and forth over his body until the snow above it was packed down like ice.
*
It is difficult to believe that such an uproar took place over an act for which I was partially responsible, even more difficult to believe I could have walked through it-the cameras, the uniforms, the black crowds sprinkled over Mount Cataract like ants in a sugar bowl-without incurring a blink of suspicion. But walking through it all was one thing; walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite another, and though once I thought I had left that ravine forever on an April afternoon long ago, now I am not so sure. Now the searchers have departed, and life has grown quiet around me, I have come to realize that while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the time: up at the top by the muddy wheel-ruts in the new grass, where the sky is dark over the shivering apple blossoms and the first chill of the snow that will fall that night is already in the air.
What are you doing up here? said Bunny, surprised, when he found the four of us waiting for him.
Why, looking for new ferns, said Henry.
And after we stood whispering in the underbrush-one last look at the body and a last look round, no dropped keys, lost glasses, everybody got everything?-and then started single file through the woods, I took one glance back through the saplings that leapt to close the path behind me. Though I remember the walk back and the first lonely flakes of snow that came drifting through the pines, remember piling gratefully into the car and starting down the road like a family on vacation, with Henry driving clench-jawed through the potholes and the rest of us leaning over the seats and talking like children, though I remember only too well the long terrible night that lay ahead and the long terrible days and nights that followed, I have only to glance over my shoulder for all those years to drop away and I see it behind me again, the ravine, rising all green and black through the saplings, a picture that will never leave me.
I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.
BOOK I
CHAPTER 1
DOES SUCH a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.
A moi. L'histoire d'une de mes folies.
My name is Richard Papen. I am twenty-eight years old and I had never seen New England or Hampden College until I was nineteen. I am a Californian by birth and also, I have recently discovered, by nature. The last is something I admit only now, after the fact. Not that it matters.
I grew up in Plano, a small silicon village in the north. No sisters, no brothers. My father ran a gas station and my mother stayed at home until I got older and times got tighter and she went to work, answering phones in the office of one of the big chip factories outside San Jose.
Plano. The word conjures up drive-ins, tract homes, waves of heat rising from the blacktop. My years there created for me an expendable past, disposable as a plastic cu...
