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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nThere are some books that feel like rites of passage into the club of the \u201ctrue reader.\u201d There\u2019s a transformative air about them perpetuated by the literary public: you read this book, you will never be the same again; you read this book, you will be ushered into the echelon of the enlightened; you read this book, you have true taste. That\u2019s the kind of atmosphere that surrounds Donna Tartt\u2019s Dark Academia novel, The Secret History<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Its critical success has given it this reputation as one of the best books of the 20th<\/sup> century, garnering glowing praise calling it ingenious, gorgeous, phenomenal. Everyone who\u2019s read it swears they\u2019ve gained some otherwise withheld pivotal knowledge of the human condition. I\u2019ve never seen it get anything less than a glowing review. It\u2019s the kind of book I\u2019ve come to associate with sophistication, intelligence, grace. Not just anybody will be able to \u201cget\u201d The Secret History<\/em>, as the aura around it suggests. How ironic given how overwhelmingly popular it is. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But the aura of eliteness surrounding the book did not just arise from its audience\u2019s vocal fervor of it. Its Dark Academia aesthetics\u2014in the writing, characters, and plot\u2014construct a story about elite New England colleges with grand, mahogany libraries; Classics students who wear tweed jackets over button up shirts to their philosophy classes; and a murder that taints it all.<\/p>\n\n\n \u201cThe snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation,\u201d so opens the book. The ensuing tale recounts the first year Richard Papen, a Californian, blue-collar wishy-washy Med-Student turned Classics major, spends at Hampden College in Vermont and how he and his classmates bonded, broke apart, and killed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Richard plays an interesting role as the main character in that he doesn\u2019t feel like the main character: he is much more of a narrator to this tale than an active participant, something he is completely aware of\u2014near the end of the book he calls himself \u201cthe bystander [\u2026] I so essentially am.\u201d Action is much more likely to be pushed forward by Richard\u2019s cohort of classmates and then recounted to him, and thus the reader, after the fact. At one point, Richard reads The Great Gatsby<\/em> and \u201cfailed to see anything except what I construed as certain tragic similarities between Gatsby and myself.\u201d Nice try there, Richard. You\u2019re a Nick Carraway through and through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No, it\u2019s really the supporting cast who dominate the page, both in terms of pushing the story forward and sticking with the audience. Henry, the eccentric scholar, Francis, the heart of the group, Charles and Camilla, a set of twins, and Bunny, the happy-go-lucky boys cluber who gets murdered by his friends. Also worthy of note is their Classics teacher, Julian, a fountain of knowledge and elegance, whom Henry feels is a god walking among them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But Richard\u2019s passive nature as a protagonist, surprisingly, propels the reader further into the novel rather than pull them out. He\u2019s easily the most relatable character in the entire story, due mostly to his feelings of loneliness and desire to fit in, not to mention he is the most \u201cnormal\u201d of the group. He\u2019s passive not because he doesn\u2019t act, but because he\u2019s not given the opportunity to act. And that\u2019s extremely interesting to read, if not exciting. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There is one definite benefit to having Richard as a narrator: the way he tells a story is breathtaking. Tartt constructs her novel as if Richard is talking directly to the reader\u2014occasionally he breaks the fourth wall for a direct address or more commonly mentions future events that have yet to unfold\u2014so really this is a way of saying Tartt is a breathtaking writer. Her style is poetic not through her diction, though her word choice is still precise, but through her winding, intricate syntax. It reminds me of the best parts of a Dickens novel, elaborating on the inner psyche of characters in such detail through long, lyrical sentences that are probably technically run-on, but feel as though your listening to an intelligent person talk about a topic of much love and passion and you just get lost in their language in the best way.<\/p>\n\n\n And what a story that language tells. The first half of the novel is almost entirely set up to the climactic scene of murder. In disclosing in the first sentence who dies and who does the killing, the story revolves around understanding the motive behind the act much more than how it was committed: a so called \u201cwhy done it\u201d instead of who. It\u2019s all about establishing the academic setting, the characters, the tone, planting subtle clues here and there that things are not all they seem. I\u2019ll be honest: it drags. It can get boring and repetitive, especially during the winter break section where Richard describes the blistering Vermont cold for about five pages straight. But the second half which goes into the consequences of the killing is much more compelling and moves a lot quicker. The reader gets to see the characters that have been painstakingly developed and described in the first half break down and change in drastic ways in the second. The tension of whether or not the characters will face consequences for their actions leaves the reader flipping pages in quick succession to see what happens next. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But do be warned: The Secret History<\/em> is a deceptively small book. Don\u2019t judge is based on the size of the spine. It\u2019s over 500 pages long and formatted with a lot of small text on the page; the audiobook is almost 24 hours long. It\u2019s a book that can\u2019t really be plowed through\u2014trust me when I say, dear reader, I tried. It took me almost a month to get through. But honestly, I think the story really benefits from taking your time with it. It allows you to get fully emersed in this world of tweed and Greek. It gives the characters time to feel familiar, time for the atmosphere to settle on you like a blanket on a snowy day, time to reflect on all the pretension and genuine intelligence mixed in with it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I wouldn\u2019t call The Secret History<\/em> an easy book to read. There\u2019s untranslated Latin, Greek, and French all over the place, the length of it can certainly be intimidating, and the first half can easily deter a reader before they\u2019ve seen the best the book has to offer. However, I think its status as modern classic is well-deserved. I now understand how its amassed its reputation as the master of Dark Academia. But I also wouldn\u2019t call it a new favorite. It\u2019s very good, but not that good (at least, in this humble reviewer\u2019s opinion). I thought it might be a favorite for a while \u2014I loved the sentences within it that much\u2014 but it lost me a little during the winter break section (we get it Richard, it was cold<\/em>) and never found me in the same loving temperament again. There\u2019s only so much goodwill a nicely written sentence can generate while the plot spins its head. What once started as a reading of passion and enthusiasm turned to one of obligation to finish the damn thing that never seemed to end and receive my welcome to the cult of the \u201ctrue reader.\u201d And now that I\u2019m in it, was it worth it? Yes\u2014The Secret History<\/em> is a really good book and I am glad that I read it. But do I actually think The Secret History<\/em> deserves this level of elitism, snobbery, and superiority for having read it? No\u2014it\u2019s not that <\/em>good. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ana Hein \/\/ Blog Writer There are some books that feel like rites of passage into the club of the \u201ctrue reader.\u201d There\u2019s a transformative air about them perpetuated by…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":1845,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-about-reading","category-opinion","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1843"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1843\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2262,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1843\/revisions\/2262"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/data.whicdn.com\/images\/344699979\/original.jpg?t=1590685884\")
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