The Secret History

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“For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive”

Donna Tartt has a way with words and so I do not doubt her ability to capture the reader’s attention from her prologue. She has had me gripped since I read The Goldfinch and this was no different. Perhaps even more. When I came across those words, I stopped, it took my breath away rather at the sheer bull’s eye hit with which it described me.

I obsess! about anything and everything. It’s my weakness, my strength, my beauty and my curse.
I’ve been told that I can really overthink shit…take one issue and comb it through to as fine as silk threads. Despite the majority’s opinion, that it’s unhealthy, I’ve been at it since my womb days, it’s woven in my DNA. I’ll experience the world one way and repeat it in the eternal world of my mind. Retelling the stories to the judge, jury and executioners in my head!

The Secret History takes us through Richard Papen’s only story he’ll live to remember.

I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell

The plot takes us through his college experience, which was similar to most but at the same time nothing like any college experience.
There were the usual struggles of friend-making, college drinking, girlfriend(s) acquisition, grades rollercoaster, teacher pleasing et al. He links and blames all this with his difficult childhood of isolation and abusive parents which leads to him falling in love with a crowd that mirrors what he feels beauty of life is made from.

“a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs”

He, however, ends us showing us how one trying to escape one bad scenario would ideally lead you to make choices that take you to something similar, same script, different cast.
There’s no such thing as escape. We just adapt.

I’ve read this book, then I’ve read its reviews which was similar to reading another novel because the folks on Goodreads don’t joke.

While engrossed in The Secret History, I weaved in and out of memories of my of life, and how everyone we meet shapes us in one way or another, we tend to think that the character traits we inherit from our parents stick with us through life but if you truly think about it, they only contribute 20% to ourselves, DNA withstanding, since the concoction is never pure, it’s made up of a cocktail of generations and so it is not uncommon to find that we are unlike them in every way.

We are greatly shaped by every experience, every face we encounter, every hand we shake, every lip we kiss and every eye we gaze into, we can trace all our behaviours, habits, beliefs down to the person that caused the ripple effect. My detachment came from the ability to adapt causing my fly on the wall nature, which has been nurtured through living in environments I felt I wasn’t needed or wanted, this all stemmed from bouncing home to home, town to town, city to city, heart to heart.

Additionally, the perception of the faces you meet reflects one’s own mirror. That is to say, we see in people what we either love or hate about ourselves. Disliking someone can stem from the fact that they live a life we wish we had but lack the freedom or abilities to do so. We draw automatic judgements on people whose paths we don’t understand or wish we had.

However, no one is an island and so you cannot avoid interacting with people who will eventually shape your views, good or bad, the mentally strong people can choose what influence to pick and drop but most succumb absorbing the energies around.
Despite this thinly veiled in society’s knowledge, the desire to belong to anything or anyone is strongly woven in us that we habitually overlook the consequences.

Donna Tartt is intricate in her details and definitely gifted in the art of description. I didn’t know what to expect from this book but that’s what makes me love such writing, the anticipated suspense. Most crime-related thrillers are usually a whodunit plot but this book reveals the culprits right at the start and the subsequent plot is an unravelling chain reaction that leads to the psychological aftermath of the close-knit fraternity snobbish students.
It definitely led to my own psychological warfare with obsessing with who or what I am and what part of that is threaded to the persons I have met or yet to meet.

Getting excited about the next read after a great book is not usually easy, Deciding what to read next after a Donna Tartt is a daunting task, it took me 6 months to recover the enthralled prison I was in when I read The Goldfinch. I now stare at my stacks of TBR and wait to be inspired enough to pick one.