bareruinedchoirs 's review for:

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

DID NOT FINISH: 16%

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The book died, I suppose, on a Tuesday. The weak, autumnal light, filtered through the grime of a mullioned window, cast a pallid glow upon the cover's severe typography. With a sigh that seemed to draw up the very dust motes dancing in that lambent air, I removed the silk bookmark for the final time. The thud of the hardback cover closing was a sound of immense finality, an execution. The DNF was done.

What precipitated such a final act? The motive was not a singular impulse, but a slow, creeping asphyxiation by a thousand paper cuts of exquisite, yet suffocating, prose. I was drowned in descriptions of the Vermont weather, of the precise weave of a character's herringbone jacket, of the way smoke from a Gauloise curled languidly towards a ceiling. That such a panoply of detail should be marshalled in a campus novel was hardly a surprise; indeed, for a narrative concerning a coterie of classics students, whose every gesture seemed a self-conscious performance of intellectual superiority, it felt almost tragically inevitable. Yet the plot, a supposedly thrilling narrative of murder, remained a distant rumour, a faint promise whispered across a vast, barren landscape of atmospheric, but agonisingly inert, detail. 

One cannot subsist on atmosphere alone; the spirit requires some forward momentum, a narrative pulse, lest it expire from sheer, beautiful, stultifying boredom.