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The Secret History, Donna Tartt Alfred A. Knopf, September 1992 It consumes you. What happens next? You obsess. But you have to put it down, things to attend to, dammit! But you cannot escape. To put it down just leaves you thinking about how soon before you can return. When you do come back (quickly), it’s more of the same. You simply can’t turn the pages fast enough. You try and force yourself to slow down, as if you are biting into a warm piece of apple pie, just a bit slower so that you can savor every last morsel. But it’s gone. Damn you, Donna Tartt! Damn you! I have things to do! Leave me be! It’s not just the suspense of the plot. That alone wouldn’t cast a spell like this. It’s that rare treasure of a book when a page turner is infused with such eloquent sentences, such phrasing—not a word out of place—that the book is elevated into another stratosphere completely. It will undoubtedly remain with you forever. ‘My life, for the most part, has been very stale and colorless. Dead, I mean. The world has always been an empty place to me. I was incapable of enjoying even the simplest things. I felt dead in everything I did.’ He brushed the dirt from his hands. ‘But then it changed,’ he said. ‘The night I killed that man…. It was the most important night of my life,’ he said calmly. ‘It enabled me to do what I’ve always wanted most.’ ‘Which is?’ ‘To live without thinking.’ Hemingway was known to edit his drafts hundreds of times over. To him, sentences were like an aged scotch or the finest wine, fermenting for years before their flavor could possibly be trusted. Judging from the length between releases of Tartt’s books and their delicious results, I can only guess how many scratches her pages become riddled with during the process. You can’t wait to tell your friends. You can’t wait for them to read. The Secret History is one of those rarest of books for me. From the mysterious here we go murder that kicks it off straight away all the way through each meticulous, in-depth plunge into character, it is crystal clear you are dealing with an author in complete command of her craft. Google search. You need a new fix. What are the latest rumors? Any word on her next release? Anything? Anything?! Stay tuned. -G |
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