Book Review: The Secret History by Donna Tartt

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Okay, so The Secret History by Donna Tartt… that book is like being invited into a beautiful, crumbling house and realizing halfway through that the floorboards are rotting under your feet—but you can’t bring yourself to leave because you’re mesmerized by the wallpaper.

Reading it felt like being swept into this strange, intoxicating bubble where beauty and horror live side by side. At first, I was drawn in by the charm of it all—the elite Vermont college setting, the tight-knit group of eccentric classics students, the way they seemed smarter, sharper, more alive than everyone else. I’ll be honest, part of me wanted to sit with them in their shadowy corners, quoting Greek, sipping wine, feeling untouchably brilliant. Tartt makes that world seductive on purpose.

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But the temptation carries its own fangs. The more I penetrated the more uneasy I felt. You are aware of that sneaky feeling when you realize that you have been liking something only to find out it is rotten? That’s what hit me. The killing occurs early, so you understand at the beginning that the darkness is on the way, but the gradual twisting of the reason and the process of how it occurred, that is where the book left a mark on me.

It happened that there were times that I was struck to the gut so that I needed to pause and sit with them. Henry was cold and precise and magnetic and terrifying. The thoughtless sadism of Bunny rattled my nerves. Then, again, there was Richard, our story-teller, who was always on the brink of becoming part of that glamour, half-carried away into the glamour, and half-conscious of the danger. That stress, the desire to be within their group despite the fact I was aware that that group was unhealthy, remained with me. It has brought me back to my own life at times when I so strongly desired to be a part of something that I did not notice red flags that were waving before my face.

The style of Tartt is so beautiful as it is rich and detailed yet it never seems to be imposed. It was now and then like seeing a group of grown-up boys and girls at play and acting like gods, and then a page later I would be experiencing this chill as I realized that the stakes had now become deadly real. The combination of ridiculous and horrifying was what made it so unsettling.

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The thing that I was left thinking about was not the actual murder, but the consequences thereof. The paranoia, the guilt, the manner in which the group begins to disintegrate under the stress of what they have done. It is not dramatic or loud, it is insidious and it infiltrates even the tiniest of interactions. Watching friendships unravel, watching loyalty curdle into fear—it felt eerily familiar, like watching how any toxic group dynamic eventually eats itself alive, just magnified to the extreme.

And likewise the loneliness of Richard. God, that part hurt. The people are all around him but he is always alone, always knowing that he is an outsider trying to peep in. That hurt of the desire to fit in so much that you will sacrifice yourself- it was more of a blow than the bloodshed. Since are we not all there in one way or another? And have we not all desired to be elected, at a cost that is prohibitive?

In the end, I was not satisfied and clean. I was haunted as I had lived in their world, and I was unable to shake it off. And that is why The Secret History has remained entrenched in my head. It is not a murder or an academic story but rather an obsession, beauty, power and the cost of too much. It is about the fact that brilliance may become poisonous, and love may become deformed and turned against the person, and there are those monsters that look the most civilized, are the ones that can be the most frightening.

Reading it was like staring at a painting so gorgeous you don’t notice, at first, the blood seeping through the frame. And even when you do notice, you can’t look away.

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The last three images was gotten from web:

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