Reviews with content warning for Gun violence - The Secret History

Reviews tagging 'Gun violence'

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

602 reviews

haleylooloo's review against another edition

challenging dark mysterious reflective tense slow-paced

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

3.75

What a strange book. Very interesting and very flawed characters all around. Sort of in that weird place where I can’t decide if I enjoyed it or hated it, but I don’t think I’m as enamored as the rest of the world seems to be. Took a long time to get going, though the last couple hundred pages did speed up & get more interesting. The ending, before the epilogue, I think made the read worth it but the beginning did drag for a while. Very well written, just Richard as a narrator was frustrating, as we’d be like 3 layers of anecdote deep.

The whole plot line with Charles and Camilla was wild, so well written because when it was revealed, I was disgusted, but also not super surprised, which was the same way Richard felt when he said that he didn’t want to admit it but he’d suspected it all along. Also the entire part with the letter was so well done.

Not my favorite Donna Tartt work, but not a bad one either.

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cell0girl's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

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

3.75

The Secret History includes some of the most sublime and sinister descriptions I have ever read. We get to witness how each character deceives us due to their two sided personalities that is gradually revealed in the text; as soon as you begin to become fond of someone, it’s as if their whole personality was a facade to their true identity. My main complaint for this book is that it’s too long for the story it follows and could have easily been condensed into half its size; the first 300 pages was purely just context, some of which isn’t used or referred to later on in the text.

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briiforte's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

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

5.0

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.

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sleepy_ink's review against another edition

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dark mysterious medium-paced

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

4.5

This book had me wondering about a lot of stuff, and the ending caught me quite off guard... There were a lot of small details that stuck with me, one thing I can not get over is the fact that I only realised that Francis was ginger, on like page 400 something... It messed with my image of him quite a bit, but it's fine I guess... :D
It also says a lot that almost every page had something for me to annotate or mark, although most of the time it was just me yelling at the amount that they smoked, expecially Henry, like for the love of god I counted 13 cigarettes during ONE conversation!! Like jesus crist...
Anyhow it was a enjoyable book, and it was definitely the type of book I like reading.

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delery's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious sad tense slow-paced

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

3.75

i know that this was a good book technically. but ughhhhh it was so so so slow and the characters were insufferable. and generally, i like insufferable characters, but they just were not doing it for me at all. maybe i wasn't in the right headspace for this book, but like.... i feel like it could have lost a hundred to two hundred pages and been better. also, was not a fan of all the racial, homophobic, and antisemitic slurs being thrown around, and like i know at times that was to show how awful these people were, but like the segment with the guy on tv was unnecessary.

also just in general, like there were lots of good twists and turns, and like i saw the incest coming but jeeeeeze i was hoping i was going to be wrong about that. and the build was good at times but really dragged at others. idk. maybe ill try it again in 20 years. but mainly i really wanted all of them to be caught. i was never rooting for them, and i think that makes a difference. because people can be awful, but still have some good, but they seemed rotten to the core from the very beginning.

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bzzzzzz's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark mysterious reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No

4.0

Generally enjoyed this. There's just about every content warning you could imagine, but they weren't being painted as healthy or good things. It was dark, but not in a way that made me feel slimy. I think it's meant to be chilling, though. The writing was magnetic. Good sentence structure and word choices. Lots of dialogue, but not in an intolerably slow way

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m4rtt4's review against another edition

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dark mysterious reflective tense slow-paced

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? It's complicated

5.0

Dark, academic, alluring, addictive and above all brilliant; also rather similar to Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment in a non-derogatory way as I loved that novel as well. I have never been so anxious over a book that is ✨no plot, just vibes✨ on the surface level, Ms. Tartt surely knows how to make one sweat over a piece of lettering paper. The length of the book can be intimidating at first, but after all those 629 pages I'm still left craving for more; the ending was too rushed and not elaborate enough in my opinion, but that's about the only negative thing I can say about this book!! Read it, you won't regret it.

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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)

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andthereishappiness's review against another edition

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5.0

the best book i have ever read in my entire life.........

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daybreakreads's review

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dark mysterious tense slow-paced

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

3.0

The first 90% of this book: overhyped, poorly researched (details that were factually inaccurate; Plano, CA is two hours’ driving distance from Disneyland, he couldn’t have seen the fireworks from his house, one of the characters reads a book written by the “Persians” which was in Arabic — odd for a book so focused on foreign language, etc.), rather pretentious.

Last 10%: twist ending was interesting, and I enjoyed it, but it didn’t justify the 22 hours I spent listening to the audiobook. The author was the voice actor, and the voice she used for Bunny was incredibly irritating.

Interesting notes:
- this is a slow burn. Doesn’t pick up at all until ~50%. The writing style is intriguing
- none of the characters (even side ones) are “good guys”
- there’s a ton of random racist/antisemetic/homophobic comments, but they’re usually a one-off thing. The only exception to this was 3/4 of the way through there was a recurring trend of anti-Arab things that served no point to the overall plot whatsoever. It was odd for a book written in the 90s. There was a fake country full of “jihadist terrorists” mentioned several times, “sand [n word]” used against a Palestinian (who was only written for a brief moment in which he was yelling as the “angry Arab man” stereotype, “Arab” and “Arabic” were used incorrectly, general xenophobic remarks, etc. And then it just randomly stopped.

As a Muslim the last thing just came across a bit ridiculous more than anything. I didn’t see the relevance, or the reason to focus significantly more on that than the other marginalized groups.

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