I grew to hate this book and seriously considered abandoning it several times, but I somehow made it to the end anyway. The book begins with narrator Theo feverish and afraid, mysteriously unable to leave his Amsterdam hotel. We flash back to when the Theo was a child, caught in a museum bombing whose effects would skew the course of his life; we then follow Theo through an unstable childhood and adolescence defined by substance abuse and bad choices, then into a young adulthood in which he continues to suffer from the same issues, and finally (hundreds of pages and very little character development later) into the frankly ridiculous and chaotic sequence of events that take him to the hotel where we began. Theo is extremely frustrating to read, a character whose musings are occasionally incisive and delightful, but inevitably become self-indulgent and whiny. The only characters I consistently enjoyed reading about were his mentor in furniture restoration (a flawed character but a stable one at least) and his friend, the unbelievable but hugely entertaining Boris, whose life choices are just as bad as Theo’s but who manages not to be a complete drip about everything. Tartt can put words together well but this book is a mess; I am so glad to be done with it.
Tag: author-donna tartt
The Secret History, by Donna Tartt
This was listed as the founding novel of the “dark academia” genre so it’s been on my list for a while. The writing is gorgeous, the kind of lush gothic creepiness that I associate with du Maurier; the content is also delightfully nerdy, full of references to literature and the classics. The narrator comes from a lower-class background, which allows him to view his high society classmates through a critical lens, even as he idolizes them and aspires to join their ranks. Meanwhile said classmates, who have no obvious grasp of how things work in the real world, drag the narrator into their obsession with the ancient Greeks, as well as their complicated interpersonal dynamics. The characters are a little too odd and unlikeable to be truly sympathetic, but the beautiful writing and the tense plot will carry you through.