Before getting on with the review, Let me ask you a question, how often do you come across a story where the beginning itself is dark and shadowy, giving off unending mysterious vibes? Not so often I presume? The Secret History for me was a book that shaped my intellectual curiosity. I am not sure how else to put it.
I admire Donna Tartt for how she takes advantage of words. Within reading the first paragraph itself you will start to experience some kind of helpless empathy for the victim. Even though practically you know nothing about them yet, the way Donna Tartt writes about the dead, there is something hauntingly beautiful about that.
I’m not going to go into the story, mainly because, you will get the gist of it after a single web search. What I want to talk about is the way, the author seems to have an engrossing capacity in holding the reader’s attention in what might an average reader term as a ‘typical murder book’. When you read the novel, however, you will know, it is so much more than that.
Why read this book?
The Secret History possesses some of the most subtle narratives one could expect in a mystery novel. Imagine a story set in cold, remote and alluring corners of the Vermont College campus, where the only people who would actually be pleased with this type of hibernal atmosphere are the students with a brutal and clandestine curiosity for something ancient, forbidden, and mystic.
‘And what is beauty?’
‘Terror’, ‘Well said’, said Julian. ‘Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory’.
Read this book because you will fall in love with the words. The words Donna Tartt so beautifully weaves in every line of the story. An average college is situated at the remote corners of Vermont, where, unlike other states, people are so little and dark woods are so abundant. Where a professor holds scary and harmless waves of personality at the same time. The students, especially the main characters, who are so willfully dumb and infinitely cunning at the same time, the ancient Greek rituals and fascinating philosophical discussions, take you away into a world of haunting and helpless curiosity.
Henry Winter is my favorite character
You know, I don’t normally get obsessed with characters often. I mean, whenever I come across a fictitious personality who is witty, traumatized, attractive, and dangerous at the same time, they do grab a reserved spot in my mind. I can’t easily let them go. But with The Secret History’s Henry Winter it is different. He sort of had a lasting effect on me long after finishing the book. I wanted to know more about him, write long and complicated essays about his stoic, unnerved nature, read fan fiction about him on every reading platform there is. But of course, I did not succumb to this formidable whim, rather, I re-read the book, not through the narrator’s perspective as it simply is, but through Henry’s.
Henry Winter. Ah how this name will always mean something to me. And how, how so intensely I wish I could meet him someday and talk about his aching, bewitched, and unconditional love for Camilla. Oh, How I wish…
