Reviews with content warning for Sexual assault - Die geheime Geschichte

Reviews tagging 'Sexual assault'

Die geheime Geschichte, by Donna Tartt

100 reviews

emwhitney's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Before you start reading my (spoiler-free) review, please note that I am not personally a fan of holding a book down and extracting every last semblance of meaning from it until it means nothing at all (at least in this case).

I picked up this book with no background knowledge other than it involved a murder and that it inspired the Dark Academia trend. In fact, I only picked up this novel because I wanted to read The Maidens by Alex Michaelides, and I saw that The Maidens had been somewhat inspired by The Secret History. This was also my first Donna Tartt novel.

That all being said, my review:

I normally don't enjoy novels or stories with morally grey (or in this case, morally deplorable) characters. I like to be able to root for at least one character, and in The Secret History... there is no such character. Everyone is awful, all of the time, and commit truly heinous deeds (I'm looking in particular at pages 453 and 484 of my copy).

However, Donna Tartt is incredible at inserting scenes that are beautiful and reel you in as a reader, almost making you forget that these are the worst people. You find out on page one that the narrator, Richard Papen, and his friends have killed one of their own: their friend and fellow Classics study Edmund "Bunny" Corcoran. The first line of the novel really drew me in well: "The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation."

Despite you as the reader knowing this from the start, the in-between scenes and lead-up to the murder, especially the hazy and blissful days spent at Francis's country home, make you believe that these people love and cherish one another, and that their friendship and idleness is something to aspire to. I think that is one of Tartt's strengths and very probably what may have drawn people in to create the Dark Academia aesthetic and willingly associate themselves with a fictional group of "friends" who do and say and think things I genuinely find quite disgusting.

I really, really enjoy Donna Tartt's writing style. If you're a fan of descriptive writing (even at the cost of potentially slowing the plot down), you would probably enjoy the writing style of The Secret History, if not the plot. Action does not happen quickly in The Secret History, not even when Bunny is killed. However, there are some really beautiful lines of prose and wonderful descriptions throughout this book that make it easy to picture what Richard sees.

I see a lot of talk describing Richard as an unreliable narrator; instead of saying that, I would say that the events of the novel are colored through his perception of them. It's a truly limited omniscient narrator, but you as a reader can "read between the lines" to see some things that Richard misses along the way.

All of the characters feel fully fleshed out, like real people instead of plot devices. I would say that the notable exception to this for most of the book is Camilla, the only girl among the Classics students. This is not because of Tartt not fleshing her out - in fact, her fleshed-outedness is more apparent as those aforementioned "in between the lines" moments. The reason she feels less real than the other characters is Richard's tendency to view her as a hazy, angel-like object of affection rather than the complex woman that she is, and I think that was conveyed brilliantly by Tartt. Camilla is often described in ethereal terms, and Richard often describes seeing her as though she is partially concealed by light, like it's too hard to look at her straight. We as readers therefore do not get to see her for who she is until very late in the novel, when Richard, despite his thoughts pertaining to her, is also forced to reckon with the reality of Camilla.

The ending of the novel (spoiler free!) I felt was appropriate. I truly could not have guessed where the characters may go or what kind of lives they would lead. I liked that it felt like Richard was updating us as if he was telling this all as a story in conversation rather than a way to tie up loose ends. Tartt doesn't seem to have an interest in tying loose ends, but she executes it in a way that left me feeling satisfied.

Overall, I give The Secret History 4/5 stars. The writing was excellent, but the first few chapters were excruciatingly long, and at times it felt like a slog with no breakpoints. The story kept me engaged and wanting to know what would happen next, but there were moments that made me feel a little sick (feel free to message me for a list of content warnings). I'm glad I read it, but I would be selective with who I recommended it to. These characters are definitely NOT to be idolized, and they are deeply flawed and Tartt seems to have meant them to be read as deeply flawed (almost like characters in a Greek tragedy). If you can recognize that and appreciate the novel for what it is, I think you would enjoy it.

Review done, here are a few of my favorite quotes:

"I watched it all happen quite calmly--without fear, withoutpity, without anything but a kind of stunned curiosity--so that the impression of the event is burned indelibly upon my optic nerves, but oddly absent from my heart." (276)

"How quickly he fell; how soon it was over." (277) - I want to say I like this line because it's a really striking example, in context, of hot topic, cold delivery that really left a mark on me in the moment of reading it.

"...in order to make our veneration of him seem more explicable; to make it seem something more, in short, than my own fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good." (512)

"Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things--naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror--are too terrible to really ever grasp 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." (278)

"What we took for a docile, ordinary weight (gentle plunk, swift rush to the bottom, dark waters closing over it without a trace) was in fact a depth charge, one that exploded quite without warning beneath the glassy surface, and the repercussions of which may not be entirely over, even now." (275)

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elia123's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark mysterious reflective tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

Great !

Content Warnings

em_gauts's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Content Warnings

cocopuff3438's review against another edition

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dark mysterious sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Content Warnings

laurataylor's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Content Warnings

unabashedlynat's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Content Warnings

rebecca_mdx's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

This book is NOT the way I saw it promoted on BookTok at all (IDK maybe I'm just on the wrong side of it). It definitely puts the "dark" in dark academia, and anyone who says Henry Winters is hot needs serious help.

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