The secret history paperback5/7/2023 All these are to be found in The Secret History, to be sure: whole passages double as litanies of evocation. I loved (I thought) exactly what its characters loved: nostalgic emblems of an era imagined as significant. I wanted (I thought) exactly what its youthful characters wanted: a poetic life, a mythic life, a life shot through with meaning. The Secret History managed, somehow, in a manner I could not articulate at the time, to both be about all the things I loved, and to miss the point of them entirely. It was the kind of book I wanted to love instead, I hated it. It was a book for people who loved other books, who shared with its protagonist, Richard Papen, a “morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.” Its plot was tailor-made for me, or for people like me: a Californian outsider is absorbed into a coterie of sexually and temporally ambiguous Classics students at a New England college, only to discover that their close-knit friendship is predicated, in part, by the frenzied, ritualistic killing of a “townie” during an inspired attempt at a bacchanal. It was a book for teenagers who studied classics, who thought in Homeric epithets, who luxuriated among the fantasy of old things. I do not remember who recommended it to me likely, it was someone who felt it was the sort of book I would enjoy, consonant with all of the other things I loved. I was 17 the first time I read Donna Tartt's 1992 novel The Secret History.
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