Donna Tartt - The Secret History 00.nfo
General Information
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Title: The Secret History
Author: Donna Tartt
Read By: the author
Abridged: No
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Number of MP3s: 28
Total Duration: 21:44:55
Total MP3 Size: 597.65
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Book Description
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Publishers Weekly:
Tartt's much bruited first novel is a huge (592 pages) rambling story
that is sometimes ponderous, sometimes highly entertaining. Part psychological
thriller, part chronicle of debauched, wasted youth, it suffers from
a basically improbable plot, a fault Tartt often redeems through the
bravado of her execution. Narrator Richard Papen comes from a lower-class
family and a loveless California home to the "hermetic, overheated atmosphere"
of Vermont's Hampden College. Almost too easily, he is accepted into
a clique of five socially sophisticated students who study Classics
with an idiosyncratic, morally fraudulent professor. Despite their demanding
curriculum (they quote Greek classics to each other at every opportunity)
the friends spend most of their time drinking and taking pills. Finally
they reveal to Richard that they accidentally killed a man during a
bacchanalian frenzy; when one of their number seems ready to spill the
secret, the group--now including Richard--must kill him, too. The best
parts of the book occur after the second murder, when Tartt describes
the effect of the death on a small community, the behavior of the victim's
family and the conspirators' emotional disintegration. Here her gifts
for social satire and character analysis are shown to good advantage
and her writing is powerful and evocative. On the other hand, the plot's
many inconsistencies, the self-indulgent, high-flown references to classic
literature and the reliance on melodrama make one wish this had been
a tauter, more focused novel. In the final analysis, however, readers
may enjoy the pull of a mysterious, richly detailed story told by a
talented writer.
Library Journal:
This well-written first novel attempts to be several things: a psychological
suspense thriller, a satire of collegiate mores and popular culture,
and a philosophical bildungsroman. Supposedly brilliant students at
a posh Vermont school (Bennington in thin disguise) are involved in
two murders, one supposedly accidental and one deliberate. The book's
many allusions, both literary and classical (the students are all classics
majors studying with a professor described as both a genius and a deity)
fail to provide the deeper resonance of such works as Umberto Eco's
The Name of the Rose . Ultimately, it works best as a psychological
thriller.
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