Donna Tartt's first novel, The Secret History, is my favorite novel. Though her other books are also very good, they do not seem to have the same poison and punch that her first does for me. The prose is so rich and beautiful, too, that I could read it a hundred times and still feel absolutely transfixed and intoxicated by the words before me. I still don't like most of the characters yet I am completely and utterly infatuated with them.
It wouldn't be a stretch to say that Donna Tartt is my favorite author, as well. It isn't just because every book she has written are ones I have enjoyed and would recommend (never mind the fact that The Goldfinch sparked a fascinating literary debate on the applications and exploitative habits of neo-romanticism, which I have always been a sucker for), but because she is an enigma herself. One time she completely abandoned a sub-plot for The Goldfinch after writing it for eight months! There is something enchanting about her, but like her writing (especially in The Secret History), there is also something deeply unsettling and kind of frightening about her gaze and demenour. Christ. Look at this woman. She is as beautiful as the creepiest portrait in any given haunted Mississippi mansion. She could read me a recipe for custard cakes and I might still shit myself. She doesn't write horror, exactly, but she definitely doesn't write pleasant novels. The Goldfinch is optimistic, sure, but it also hosts Boris, an alcoholic 14 year old and abused Russian kid.
I would recommend The Secret History to anyone who has some understanding of Dionysian and Apollonian expression, whether they despise it or love it. I would also recommend this book to anyone who is a pretentious cunt about concepts of beauty. If you have read The Portrait of Dorian Grey and understood it in the slightest, you will pick up what Tartt is putting down. You can read this book hating everything it stands for and still come out a little shaken because it isn't as if the enduring narrator isn't self-aware of the world he involves himself in. Or, alternatively, you can go in to it as the romantic optimist I am and be totally ruined every time. I give the book 10/10 poisonous mushrooms.
Donna Tartt's prose carries me like a river all at once slow and deliberate, then rushing and terrifying with seamless transition. She doesn't use dredging and constant description and yet there are passages like Richard's stint in the attic that still vividly come to life for me. Instead of describing her fictional universe, Tartt consistently uses art to imitate the life of her novels. Her allusions to classical mythology, historical artistic expressionism, and most notably Greek philosophy are central themes of her novels and effectively leech in to her characters and setting. I believe that The Secret History is where she is most successful with this (though critics would certainly argue with me on this). The inter-textual blend between Greek philosophy, idealism, and mythology and the novel's plot and characters is beautifully done and this results in a blend of ideas on beauty, consequence, and significance which leaves a mythological kind of effect on the whole novel. I found it such a rich experience to witness her characters blur their own lines between mythos and reality and consequentially morals and purpose. Even in the beginning, when her quasi-detective type novel opens, Tartt has Richard trace the divide between the real world and real people in contrast with the luscious, divine, and mysterious world of the Greek scholars. This illusion is lasting throughout the novel and in moments of brutal clarity, especially between Charles and Richard, the effect of this graying and blurring of the divide is just as much of a shock to readers as it is to Richard, our narrator. Puzzling out the extent to which the characters do and do not feel for Bunny is a shared uncomfortable experience between Richard and the reader and though I have read the novel upwards of 6 or 7 times, still I cannot find where I stand in agreance with the group or with Richard. I know what I want to believe, but even the romantic conclusion proves to be more upsetting than a more brutal dissection of the motives behind murder.
Though Richard is an extremely immersive narrator, I have always found Henry to be the most enduring image and personality. Our struggle with Henry and the confusion (SPOILER ALERT)
regarding his suicide and emotion are an essential part of the novel's experience and ultimate conundrum:
If the actions of the group and/or individuals can be justified, what is to be said about the art they study? When art imitates life and when life embraces this, is beauty the result of living freely in 'essential nature', or is this idea still a forced notion if it still stems from the effort to imitate?
The whole novel plays out with this feeling of sick tension and foreshadowing and I know I have always been a sucker for these things, but it really is exceptional in this novel. In some novels, foreshadowing is just a collection of isolated events or symbols just showing up here and there to remind the reader that there are themes and things that will happen eventually, but Tartt really shows restraint with this. The foreshadowing evident in The Secret History is a lot more sinister and subtle, such as a description of a laugh or the catch of a mistaken spoken word. Romanticized portraits we are introduced to in the beginning grow twisted and desperate and this isn't even done through the focused eye of the narrator. At times, it appears to happen in the background and catching these transitions are then all the more unsettling for the reader. Her imagery isn't subtle, to be fair, but I'll forgive it because it is fucking stunning.
That is how the book opens. This is how the narrator introduces himself. How can you not be immediately in love and totally disgusted by how pretentious and beautifully telling this is of how the rest of the novel will follow?!
Bunny's character so often challenges others and though his death is known from the beginning and happens only half-way through the novel, it permeates all else with the same haunting quality he exhibits when he was alive. There have been rumours of this novel being adapted for the screen and I am cautiously optimistic about this- only David Fincher could pull this off, the way I see it. If it doesn't have the same feel as Gone Girl but with the sick, romantic sentimentalism framing the story throughout, I simply will not be happy with it and honestly neither would Tartt. She is a bitch of a perfectionist, that woman.
Everything about this novel draws me in and clenches at my heart with genuine force- the art of the novel gripping and beautifully symbolical, the characters so alive and lined with mythos, the prose philosophical and engaging, and the plot does something I just love- it lends itself to the other elements of the novel like a creative support as opposed to a platform.
There is nothing else like it. The Secret History is like a legend in the mist that reveals itself as horrifyingly real with characters who resist sympathy but who are still so open and fun to explore.
Incidentally, this article about The Goldfinch is a good read, even if I do not necessarily agree with some of the later statements:
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2014/07/goldfinch-donna-tartt-literary-criticism
It wouldn't be a stretch to say that Donna Tartt is my favorite author, as well. It isn't just because every book she has written are ones I have enjoyed and would recommend (never mind the fact that The Goldfinch sparked a fascinating literary debate on the applications and exploitative habits of neo-romanticism, which I have always been a sucker for), but because she is an enigma herself. One time she completely abandoned a sub-plot for The Goldfinch after writing it for eight months! There is something enchanting about her, but like her writing (especially in The Secret History), there is also something deeply unsettling and kind of frightening about her gaze and demenour. Christ. Look at this woman. She is as beautiful as the creepiest portrait in any given haunted Mississippi mansion. She could read me a recipe for custard cakes and I might still shit myself. She doesn't write horror, exactly, but she definitely doesn't write pleasant novels. The Goldfinch is optimistic, sure, but it also hosts Boris, an alcoholic 14 year old and abused Russian kid.I would recommend The Secret History to anyone who has some understanding of Dionysian and Apollonian expression, whether they despise it or love it. I would also recommend this book to anyone who is a pretentious cunt about concepts of beauty. If you have read The Portrait of Dorian Grey and understood it in the slightest, you will pick up what Tartt is putting down. You can read this book hating everything it stands for and still come out a little shaken because it isn't as if the enduring narrator isn't self-aware of the world he involves himself in. Or, alternatively, you can go in to it as the romantic optimist I am and be totally ruined every time. I give the book 10/10 poisonous mushrooms.
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| Apollo and Dionysus |
Though Richard is an extremely immersive narrator, I have always found Henry to be the most enduring image and personality. Our struggle with Henry and the confusion (SPOILER ALERT)
regarding his suicide and emotion are an essential part of the novel's experience and ultimate conundrum:
If the actions of the group and/or individuals can be justified, what is to be said about the art they study? When art imitates life and when life embraces this, is beauty the result of living freely in 'essential nature', or is this idea still a forced notion if it still stems from the effort to imitate?
The whole novel plays out with this feeling of sick tension and foreshadowing and I know I have always been a sucker for these things, but it really is exceptional in this novel. In some novels, foreshadowing is just a collection of isolated events or symbols just showing up here and there to remind the reader that there are themes and things that will happen eventually, but Tartt really shows restraint with this. The foreshadowing evident in The Secret History is a lot more sinister and subtle, such as a description of a laugh or the catch of a mistaken spoken word. Romanticized portraits we are introduced to in the beginning grow twisted and desperate and this isn't even done through the focused eye of the narrator. At times, it appears to happen in the background and catching these transitions are then all the more unsettling for the reader. Her imagery isn't subtle, to be fair, but I'll forgive it because it is fucking stunning."Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw' that shadowy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside of 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"
That is how the book opens. This is how the narrator introduces himself. How can you not be immediately in love and totally disgusted by how pretentious and beautifully telling this is of how the rest of the novel will follow?!
Everything about this novel draws me in and clenches at my heart with genuine force- the art of the novel gripping and beautifully symbolical, the characters so alive and lined with mythos, the prose philosophical and engaging, and the plot does something I just love- it lends itself to the other elements of the novel like a creative support as opposed to a platform.
There is nothing else like it. The Secret History is like a legend in the mist that reveals itself as horrifyingly real with characters who resist sympathy but who are still so open and fun to explore.
Incidentally, this article about The Goldfinch is a good read, even if I do not necessarily agree with some of the later statements:
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2014/07/goldfinch-donna-tartt-literary-criticism
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