Selected Product:
| The Secret History
Paperback
Author: Donna Tartt
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 2004-04-13
ISBN-10: 1400031702
ISBN-13: 9781400031702
List Price: $14.95
Average Customer Rating:
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Truly deserving of the accolade a modern classic, Donna Tartt’s novel is a remarkable achievement—both compelling and elegant, dramatic and playful.
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.
This is a great book - a must read for the winter.
| Customer Rating: | | I was turned on to this book after reading The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. She says that this book was the reason she began writing. I loved the Historian so much that I decided to read this one as well. needless to say, I was not disappointed. It's a nice little murder mystery with a twist. It's a really easy read - let's hope Hollywood doesn't find out about it and ruin it. |
Well written page turner
| Customer Rating: | | I love this book. I bought it many years ago and recently gave a copy to my best friend and teenage daughter. They both thought it was a remarkable book as well. I won't go into detail about the characters or plots, as others have done, but it is a FAVORITE book of mine. |
A Very Powerful Novel
| Customer Rating: | | I have just completed reading this novel for a second time, having initially read it shortly after it was first published. Then, as now, I simply did not want it to end; and each time I put it aside, I did so reluctantly. The rarely seen, but always present force behind this novel is Julian, a classics teacher at an elite school in Vermont. Around him gathers a small cadre of select students. His students, all wealthy or pretending to be so, take courses almost exclusively from Julian ( a fitting name, for it was the Roman Emperor Julian who tried unsuccessfully to rekindle in an increasingly Christian Rome, worship of the fading, old Gods of the pre-Christian world). In The Secret History, Julian's students commit a ritualistic murder, seen by them as a sacrifice of sorts, and, then, murder one of their own circle who is perceived as being on the verge of disclosing their crime. Ms. Tartt's description of the family dynamics at the home of the fallen student prior to his funeral is richly detailed, yielding a level of authenticity that tenaciously absorbs the reader. Each of the students in her novel is convincingly described, and each in depth. We find Henry, for example, Julian's prize pupil, concerned about which classic text he should carry and display in Court to convey the right image, precisely what the reader would expect from this anachronistic young man. On second reading, my appreciation for Ms. Tartt's gifts only grew. The Secret History is simply one of the best modern novels I have read. |
The Heart of the History
| Customer Rating: | | What to say about this book..I've started this review more than five times. It's an elusive thing. Tartt can create images like the most detailed, beautiful Carleton Watkins photograph you've ever seen...convincing dialogue as well. The test is to bundle all these images into a cohesive story that hangs together. Along the way I had my doubts, but in the end it worked. The book has stayed with me and I keep asking myself questions about duty and character and people/things appearing one way, but being another. These are worth continuing to ponder. |
A Modern Classical Tragedy
| Customer Rating: | I first read this book when it debuted in 1992, intrigued as much by the fact that a first-time author received a $450,000 advance as by the blurbs about the plot. In some ways, this is the novel that my friends would have expected me to write. After all, it involves Latin, Greek, fountain pens, Classics students, a Mustang, and one reference to Alexander Pope. As I came near the end of this second reading, some sixteen years after the first, I felt a melancholy that I had not for some time, but one that was familiar. It was the sadness of knowing that a book that has completed captivated you and taken you into its world, is coming to an end, and like the characters whose further lives you will never know, you must face the light of life around you.
Indeed, this is the secret of the book, both for its characters and for the enjoyment of its countless readers. It takes you to places beyond yourself, yet somehow inside yourself as well, places that are at once frightening and familiar, and frightening because they are familiar.
Make no mistake, the characters are utterly amoral by Christian standards, and because of this are led to extreme immorality and crime. I can honestly say I know no one like any of the characters, nor have I participated in any of the activities that rule their lives (except for the study of Greek and Latin and the use of fountain pens), yet I know them. They and their experiences are familiar. Perhaps this is not unlike the familiarity one feels with Classical tragedies that, despite their wildly different settings and motivations from modern times, transcend time to connect with people of all ages. In this regard, The Secret History takes its place alongside the tragic works that its characters study.
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