THE SECRET HISTORY

Donna Tart

The Secret History follows Richard Papen, our narrator, and five wealthy and snobby Classics students in the 80s, under the wing of Professor Julian Morrow, with an unorthodox and eccentric way of teaching. You can barely call Morrow´s class friends, they were just friendly with each other and they didn’t like to mingle with other majors.

“It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves?”

Richard is a working-class Californian student, with a fatal flaw of “a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs”. He moves to a new college to get away from his blue collar parents and everyone he once knew, as soon as he gets to New England decides to reinvent himself and hide from everyone that he’s on financial aid, making him the outcast.

A song that reminds me of the book: Lose Your Soul- Dead Man’s Bones

Two things happened to me while reading this book, in each page I craved a glass of whisky, or two, and I longed to be part of an exclusive Greek major at a private liberal arts college. The fact that I’m not studying Aristotle or Plato, while wearing a tweed jacket, as it’s snowing outside, makes me angry.

I would recommend you read the book slowly, so you can really enjoy the prose. When I first read it, sometimes I had to put down the book, breathe, take a sip of whisky, and admire what I just read. Also, I would ask you read it in autumn.

Somehow, they went from trying to find the perfect way to decline a word, to a cult-like class, looking to recreate an authentic Greek bacchanal —yes, drugs, sex, alcohol and hedonism included —, to concealing not one, but two murders. I mean, they got what they wanted, they lost their minds in the middle of the woods, they gave up reason, they danced as wolves with the Gods… they just got carried away and murdered someone.

That first murder was too much for them, they became unraveled. They tried to be as calm as possible, but they got more people involved and they ended up killing one of their own. What comes after is the remaining five attending a funeral, getting drunk, kissing each other, crashing a car, running away in the middle of a party, and even getting arrested.

“Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things - naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror - are too terrible to really grasp ever at all. It is only later, in solitude, in memory that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself - quite to one’s surprise - in an entirely different world.”