At the (fictional) university of Hampden it admits us to Julian Morrow's select class of Hellenophiles and allows us to commune with the most alluring civilisation of all.ģ. But the novel, through its narrator, is also in love with Greek philosophy and history, with Homer and Plato.

The main characters believe so strongly in the power of these myths that they find themselves enacting one of them. Donna Tartt proves the truth of what literary parents piously tell their children: nothing can beat the Greek myths. As we read The Secret History, we don't so much wonder what might happen as worry about what will happen.Ģ. Coleridge said that Shakespeare always made apprehension predominate over surprise, and this is what Donna Tartt does. 'This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.' We will have to read on to find out how he could have done such a thing. He appears to have got away with it – and yet to be haunted by it. The novelist's first trick is also her best: in a prologue, her narrator, Richard Pappin, tells us of the murder of Bunny, a crime 'for which I was partly responsible'. She was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, and is a graduate of Bennington College.1. Her novels The Secret History and The Little Friend were also international bestsellers.

Hugely ambitious and compulsively readable, this is a chronicle of deception and complicity, of Dionysian abandon, of innocence corrupted by self-love and moral arrogance and, finally, it is a story of guilt and responsibility.Īn astonishing achievement by any standard, The Secret History immediately establishes Donna Tartt as a supremely gifted novelist.ĭonna Tartt won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for her most recent novel, The Goldfinch. But once taken into their confidence, he and the others slowly and inevitably begin to believe in the necessity of murdering the one classmate and friend who might betray both their secret and their future. Mesmerized by his new comrades, Richard is unaware of the crime which they have committed in his dreamy, unwitting presence. Together they study the mysteries of ancient Greek culture and spend long weekends at an old country house, reading, boating, basking in an Indian summer that stretches late into autumn. Then, amazed, Richard Papen is drawn into the ultimate inner circle: five students, worldly and self-assured, selected by a charismatic classics professor to participate in the search for truth and beauty. These are the confessions, years afterward, of a young man who found at a small Vermont college the life of privilege and intellect he'd long coveted - and rarely has the glorious experience of youth infatuated with knowledge and with itself been so achingly realized. Storytelling in the grand manner, The Secret History is a debut remarkable for its hypnotic erudition and acute psychological suspense, and for the richness of its emotions, ideas, and language. Near fine in publisher's acetate dust jacket.

The secret history paperback