Reviews with content warning for Chronic illness - The Secret History

My all time favorite. This book is ripe with complicated characters and steeped with illustrious detail. Each chapter left with me more questions and the epilogue lives in my head forever more.

Content Warnings

samugranjo's review against another edition

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dark emotional funny mysterious reflective tense

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Just finished reading The Secret History and can’t help but be stuck thinking about the pursuit of aesthetic. It quite saddens me that the very obvious moral of this novel gets so easily lost at times, and the idea of finishing it and going back to my life of aesthetic pursuit sounds dreadful but expectable in this imagery fill age of quick dopamine.

I could make an extensive review solely complimenting the terrific writing of Donna Tartt and her plot construction, but I feel that to fall into the mistake of staying merely on the picturesque level and not drive into the base ideas entranced into it would be a massive disservice to the author. So instead, I will be exploring a bit of my personal relationship with this book and why I find it a valuable read.

“It has always been hard for me to talk about Julian without romanticizing him. In many ways, I loved him the most of all; and it is with him that I am most tempted to embroider, to flatter, to basically reinvent. I think that is because Julian himself was constantly in the process of reinventing the people and events around him, conferring kindness, or wisdom, or bravery, or charm, on actions which contained nothing of the sort. It was one of the reasons I loved him: for that flattering light in which he saw me, for the person I was when I was with him, for what it was he allowed me to be” (p. 576)

My entire life I feel like I have been constructing intricate characters of which the skin I can dress myself with, representing a capsule of ideas and values and how I desire to translate these to the exterior. My own name has been chosen on the basis of a character that could represent everything I wish I would be, as well as everything I wish I wasn’t nicely accompanied by people to love me for it anyways. As a queer person who grew up surrounded by social media and mental health issues, I often regard my life as an endless performance. Even my love for reading started as an attempt to be more like the people who read around me – I feel in love with the act of reading before I can remember falling in love with a book itself.

“Though Julian could be marvelously kind in difficult circumstances of all sorts, I sometimes got the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture.” (p. 539)

If I search my memory well enough, I can find some vivid memories of playing dress up and makeover games in primary school. This was done with a notebook on the side, so I could make notes of everything I did to the animations and be able to do the same to myself later on. These lists of things I would do before the new year, new month, new week, were not just beauty centered. In my mind they translated into making friends, being positively perceived, having good grades and above else just having a clue of what I was doing and enjoying myself while doing it.

These lists become a ever present friend while I was growing up, and the act would be repeated in different media. The mannerisms of the beautiful and interesting character that was loved by everyone else, the Instagram account from which I saved pictures so I could inspire myself later, the Tumblr thread full off books that I must read no matter how much I lacked interest in some, the Pinterest albums that represented how I wished to be perceived in the coming year, and so on.

“I had spent dozens of hours studying the photographs as though if I stared at them long enough and longingly enough I would, by some sort of osmosis, be transported into their clear, pure silence. Even now I remember those pictures, like pictures in a storybook one loved as a child." (p.10)

I learned how to present myself and how to translate how I wanted to be perceived into aesthetic ideals before I could even quite grasp what those ideals meant, and until this day I have a hard time letting go of this desire for image base simplification.

“Viewed from a distance, his character projected an impression of solidity and wholeness which was in fact as insubstantial as a hologram; up close, he was all motes and light, you could pass your hand right through him. If you stepped back far enough, however, the illusion would click in again and there he would be, bigger than life, squinting at you from behind his little glasses and raking back a dank lock of hair with one hand. A character like his disintegrates under analysis. It can only be denned by the anecdote, the chance encounter or the sentence overheard.” (p. 438)

The morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs (p. 5) is culturally ingrained in us, and in the present, it can be interesting to consider what role does social media and image based websites have on this. We are all increasingly longing for outer beauty and constructing and shifting aesthetic ideals, so we can chase them and feel in control of how we are perceived and what our life is made of. But we often forgot that we also need to fill the shell itself. These aesthetics can be fun and even empowering at times, but on their own they will not make us fulfilled, they will fail in giving us a sense of community as well as one of individuality. And above all, they leave us with a sore taste in our mouths and a sense of disappointment, because the more we attempt to find fulfillment in them, the more we feel like the failure is in ourselves – the aesthetic is not the right one or we are not letting ourselves fall into it enough – and not in the chase itself.

“'After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great,' he said. 'To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident of one's moment of being. (…) . But one mustn't underestimate the primal appeal – to lose one's self, lose it utterly. And in losing it be born to the principle of continuous life, outside the prison of mortality and time.” (p. 182)

And when does it stop? When does the disconnect become too striking to be ignored any longer? When does the romanization start to make the thing itself rotten and disappointing and how do we avoid that? When do we stop and recognize that just because we are deeply absorbed by this road it does not mean we should keep following it?

“There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty – unless she is wed to something more meaningful – is always superficial. It is not that your Julian chooses solely to concentrate on certain, exalted things; it is that he chooses to ignore others equally as important.” (p. 577)

The imaginary world, the picturesque and its beauty, can be tremendous tools in driving through the madness of the real world. But on itself they are not enough, we need to find fulfillment in reality, and love in presence.

Original review at: The dangers of longing for the picturesque - A... - Ethereal Ageing (tumblr.com)

Content Warnings

maryamgo9909's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional funny informative mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

Content Warnings

nicoleme1212's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated

5.0

Content Warnings

torismazarine's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

Content Warnings

judehp's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I found the narrative a bit robotic towards the end

Content Warnings

mrs_elliott19's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

“Love doesn’t conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.”

Blurb:

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 morality, their lives are changed profoundly and for ever.

The Secret History is a story of two parts; the chain of events that led to the death of a classmate—and what happened next.

Thoughts:

Let me start off my review my saying I simple picked up this book due to seeing people gush about it over and over on instagram, and the fact that it was first published the year I was born.

I’m not gonna lie, it took me a longggg time to read it, simply because the first half was almost so boring I almost didn’t finish it.

But, in the end, I am glad I did. It is incredible slow at the beginning I will admit, but in the end, I am glad I stuck threw and finished its.

Content Warnings: Murder, Alcoholism, Suicide, Incest, Racist Slurs, Toxic Relationships, Drugs, Addiction, Animal Death, Bullying, A Little Sexual Contact, Hate Crime, Toxic Friendships – to list a few, you can find more on StoryGraph.

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