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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.… (més)
BookshelfMonstrosity: Something disturbing sometimes happens when young people congregate. These gothic tales feature young, bohemian, and intellectual characters becoming caught up in relationships that lead to tragic results.
urban_lenny: Similar New England setting, some similarities between the characters of Owen and Bunny, both stories told with the foreshadowing of death.
Donna Tartt really knows how to evoke a mood and create a story that sticks with you. While the central characters of The Secret History aren't exactly what you'd call likable, they all feel so very real that I suspect I'll be thinking about them for quite sometime and that's a mark of good writing. Some reviews seemed to indicate that the book ran long, but this isn't so much a book about plot, although that is an important part of it. What it is is a book about mood and character and it helps to have the space to sit with those things in order to reach the pay offs. ( )
Ordinary guy is overwhelmed by acceptance into a strange clique of students studying Classics under an eccentric professor. He continues uncertain of his status until a confession by one member draws him into the groups dark secret. Madness segues into even darker logic.
everyone's said everything about this book already. its a banger and was great to re-read after actually going to college in New England. is it bad that Bunny's funeral is the funniest scene in the whole book? ( )
Glacially paced, very much with the connotation of being steady and inexorable. (Thank goodness for audiobooks; still, 20 hours is a lot.) Incredibly campy.
I'm never going to be over the fact that she named the twins who sleep together Charles and Camilla. How much of an upper-class twit in-joke was this in 1992?
The teacher, Julian, is a side character at best. His sexuality is lampshaded and played for laughs more than present; early on I could have sworn we were going to get a Julian/Henry relationship. I never had any doubt how the ending was going to go down. I was only surprised he didn't turn out to be two steps ahead of his students.
There are so many books and movies that must be intentionally riffing on this one---[b:The Likeness|5941114|The Likeness (Dublin Murder Squad, #2)|Tana French|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1538062804l/5941114._SY75_.jpg|6504351] was one that occurred to me. ( )
As a ferociously well-paced entertainment, ... "The Secret History" succeeds magnificently. Forceful, cerebral and impeccably controlled, "The Secret History" achieves just what Ms. Tartt seems to have set out to do: it marches with cool, classical inevitability toward its terrible conclusion.
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Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes. — PLATO, Republic, Book II
I enquire now as to the genesis of a philologist and assert the following: 1. A young man cannot possibly know what Greeks and Romans are. 2. He does not know whether he is suited for finding out about them. — FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen
Dedicatòria
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For Bret Easton Ellis, whose generosity will never cease to warm my heart; and for Paul Edward McGloin, muse and Maecenas, who is the dearest friend I will ever have in this world.
Primeres paraules
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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 caming from New Hampshire, upstate New York, as far away as Boston. -Prologue
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. -Chapter 1
Citacions
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...how I longed to be an orphan when I was a child!
[They were] sitting at a table that was spread with papers and pens and bottles of ink. The bottles of ink I remember particularly, because I was very charmed by them, and by the long black straight pens, which looked incredibly archaic and troublesome.
[The tutor] reached for a pen in a cup on his desk; amazingly, it was full of Montblanc fountain pens, Meisterstucks, at least a dozen of them.
"Guess what," said Bunny, "Henry bought himself a Montblanc pen." ... He nodded at the cup of sleek black pens that sat on Julian's desk. "How much are those things worth? ... Three hundred bucks a pop? ... I remember when you used to say how ugly they were. You used to say you'd never write with a thing in your life but a straight pen." ... Bunny picked [the pen] up and turned it back and forth in his fingers. "It's like the fat pencil I used to use in first grade," he said. ... "Now, what kind of pens do we all use here? Francois, you're a nib-and-bottle man like myself, no? ... and you, Robert? What sort of pens did they teach you to use in California?" "Ball points," I said.
Darreres paraules
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I watched his back receding down the long, gleaming hall.
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.