Reviews with content warning for Xenophobia - The Secret History

Reviews tagging 'Xenophobia'

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

156 reviews

caitlink's review against another edition

challenging dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated

4.75

My favorite part of this book has to be the multiple language usage throughout the book. It is not that often but I really loved it. Especially if it was a language I was learning and I was actually able to understand it.

I can verify about the thing about thinking in different languages that supposed to slow down your thoughts or keep them from going wild. At least in my experience that is true. Honestly that is some good advice. I would say that if you take anything away from that book, it should be or one of them should be to think in a different language when you're worried.

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whoisrois's review against another edition

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dark funny tense slow-paced

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

4.5

never smoked in my life but this book had me craving cigarettes and a cocktail 🍸 🚬🚬🚬

Content Warnings

lisa_m's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

This book was definitely something. It was way longer than I expected it to be and also quite slow paced but for some reason I still could not put it down. I read it in pretty much a day. It was kind of like a train crash you can't look away from but not because it's bad, just because it's so insane.

The story gets told to us by Richard who is the new guy and through whom we get to know the other protagonists. The setting and the whole group of strange classics students is very intriguing and you just want to know more about them. But as the story continues their behaviour becomes stranger and stranger.

So much is happening that I don't even know how to properly summarise my thoughts on this book. I think the easiest would be to talk about each character individually:

- Bunny:

I have to say that I did not like Bunny. I did not like any of the characters really but they still intruiged me. Bunny though is pretty much the exact person I would hate to be confronted with in reallife. He is manipulative, selfish, elitist and very prejudiced. We find out right in the beginning that by the end of the story, he will be dead and I can't say I was very unhappy about that. He is the first one who actually talks to Richard and includes him but after that good first impression it pretty much just went downhill. I feel bad for him, not just because of his family and upbringing but also because he was murdered by his best friends. I wish we got to read the message he left for Julian in full. He seemed so desperate and scared (and for good reason) After all the bad things he said and did, it humanised him to me again.

- Richard:

He is new and wants to fit in with the others in the group very badly. He is a very morally grey person. As a reader we are automatically sympathetic to him because we learn about everything from his perspective. Still I do not like him.

- Camilla and Charles:

I can only talk about the twins as a pair. Honestly for the majority of the book they were my favourites. Yes they were complicated and also involved in the insanity going on but they were kind and very welcoming to Richard. At least to me the further development of their characters was very surprising. Charles goes completely off the rails and I can't fully merge the kind Charles we get to know in the beginning with the reckless driver-sleeps with and abuses his sister-alcoholic-irrational-tries to shoot someone with a gun-Charles he is towards the end. Camilla was also quite different when I first read about her. To me she was a sort of Artemis figure like how she is described during the Bacchanal. I didn't like how later in the book instead of developing her character individually she just becomes this romantasised love-interest to pretty much everyone except Francis. I didn't like that she was just depicted as this callous woman who likes making people fall in love with her. I also don't believe she was actually in love with Henry. He rescued her from a terrible situation but I don't think he is capable of love. I think he was obsessed with her and very much liked to possess her and she knew that too.
The incestuous relationship between the twins was teased a couple of times but even though I was supicious of it I liked them too much to actually think it was happening. When they kissed in front of Richard I was very shocked. But even more so when Camilla tells him that she is scared of Charles and that he abuses her. I saw that coming even less with how close they seemed to be.

- Francis:

I felt quite bad for Francis a lot of the times. Not only was one of his best friends a raging homophobe who he can't even be alone with for that reason, the boy he actually likes pretends nothing is happening between them and prefers to sleep with his own sister. He is also so stressed about everything happening he has a panic attack and later tries to kill himself. Still through all of that he is not a good person either. (None of them are).

- Henry:

Oh Henry. He's a complicated one. I was very intruiged by him in the beginning as well. He was my second favourite after the twins. Not only is he very generous he's also very focused on his studies which seem to be everything to him. He's clearly very intelligent but in the beginning you don't see that as a bad thing. The more the story continued though, the more I started to doubt him. Many things about him never get explained. He clearly is a psychopath and a very dangerous one too. He's the only one who actually kills anyone. The others were just there and so loyal to him they didn't turn him in. I don't think I will ever fully understand him. Did he leave the plane tickets out for Richard to find? It seems like a stupid oversight that's very unlike Henry. I think he wanted Richard to know. I don't understand why he killed himself. Did he really think he would survive? I don't think it was because of anything like remorse. What was the actual relationship between Henry and Julian? It was way closer than between Julian and the other students but we never find out.
I'm also very curious if Henry would have continued killing if he hadn't died. I really think he would have. He said himself that he enjoyed it and he was the one doing the actual killing. Also even though he denies it I am convinced he tried to kill Charles too. Charles may have been a bit irrational but I think he was very justified and correct in being scared of Henry and what he might do to him.
Henry for a majority of the book had control over the group. He's the one who makes decision and tells them what to do. He tells Richard about everything. The biggest warning sign was when he poisoned his neighbors dogs to to try out the poison with which he wanted to kill Bunny. Thats psychopath 101

- Julian:

I expected Julian to not only play a more important role in the story but also just to show up more. Except for being the one who chose every student individually he doesn't really have much to do with the story. Unless of course there is something we don't know. Henry looked up to him very much and he's the one who came up with the idea for the Bacchanal. So what if the idea was actually Julians? That would perhaps explain why he ran and cut contact with them all. Julian is definitely a very strange character. He's not a good person either but we don't actually know how much of an influence he had on his students. He isolated them and made them rely solely on him and each other. I wish we got a few more answers about him and his perspective and intentions.

Okay now that we went through all the main characters let's move on to some theories and thoughts I had while reading.

1. I think it was Richard and Francis who are driving together in a car when they have to stop and they see something that is neither a deer nor a dog and they say it's a big cat. As soon as I read this part I was CONVINCED it would turn out that this big cat was the one who killed the farmer. Wouldn't that have been a twist? If shortly after they kill Bunny it turns out they aren't responsible for the first murder? That they just murdered their friend for nothing? I really thought that would happen, but sadly it did not.

2. I think it's so insane how pretty much the entire group is in some kind of big love triangle. Henry and Camilla, Camilla and Charles, Charles and Francis, Francis and Richard, Richard and Camilla. The only one uninvolved was Bunny and he would be SHOCKED if he ever found out about all this.

3. As much as I did not like Bunny, he had the only understandable reaction to murder. He found his best friends drenched in blood after having killed a man in their delirium. It makes sense that he cannot just move on.

4. I think we never got the full truth about what really happened during the Bacchanal. We only heard Henry's account of it and he clearly only told Richard what he wanted him to know. I wish we got different perspectives on it. I'm not sure I trust anything Henry is saying actually. The whole thing intruiges me but we never get any real answers.

I'm not sure if this is actually a review or just me rambling and venting my thoughts on this book but oh well. I had a couple of issue but all in all I understand why this book is seen as the classic example for Dark Acadmia. It's a bunch of rich, pretentious and educated people trying to rationalise murder. I don't even know what more to say. If you like Dark Academia you will probably like this.

Content Warnings

adventurouspotato's review against another edition

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dark reflective tense slow-paced

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

4.5

A little drawn out in chapters 6 and 7 but wow that ending!!

Content Warnings

lauragodin's review against another edition

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dark emotional fast-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

uhhjeepers's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

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

5.0

This book is a gift to people who like literature and value pretentiousness in controlled environments, such as a novel.

I’ve had this book on my list since I entered college, and I graduated this May. There’s almost some magic to reading it once I’ve gotten my degree, as I’m not too close but not that far removed. It’s the perfect in-between that I think this book dabbles in itself, in its own ways.

Unreliable narrators are my bread and butter, and Richard feels like their forefather — the one who came before. The first person immediately introduces doubt but makes me so close to him that I always want to take his word as truth. But despite my inclination to trust him, I still feel doubt even as the covers are closed. And that is beautiful, that lingering.

The other characters are equally, if not more, captivating than our first-person guide through the world. I’m very partial to Henry and Francis, I was endeared to them early on and stuck with that feeling even when Richard implored me to feel otherwise, even against my own better judgment. None of them were trustworthy or even necessarily good, but I loved them all the same.

The plot in this book is just as lively as the characters. I loved it in the exciting and the mundane equally, and that comes from Donna Tartt’s expert navigation of the perspective. Richard’s purposeful omissions and emphases make the pacing feel alive, literally, like the ebb and flow of life. The rush and dawdle of day-to-day. I loved it.

I’m generally an emotional person, but I really had to fight back tears finishing this in public. I felt sad for events, for characters, and for the simple act of being done. And that is such a testament to the greatness of a book — an unwillingness to leave it. I’ll certainly return in due time.

Apologies for such a wordy and gushy review. I feel like I always talk more and have a greater appreciation for word play after I read something that hits me the way this did. This book is dark academia magic in its purest form, so if you’re looking for that, look at this. But beware that every other dark academia book experience will be informed by this one, past and present.

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unassumingdork's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark medium-paced

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

4.75

Such a fantastic read. I will definitely be reading all of Tartt’s other work, I can’t wait for her current project to come out. .25 star deduction for very minor things throughout the book I might’ve liked to see differently.

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helhas3letters's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

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

1.75

Never have I read about a group of people so pretentious yet so vapid, so snobbish yet so thick, so self-involved yet so empty, so exhausting yet so inexcusably BORING.

Not a single one of these characters is likeable (perhaps maybe Georges LaForgue), so I just did not care one bit about what happened to them. And what on earth is with everyone

being utterly obsessed with and casually kissing Camilla?!? This woman is apparently a prop for everyone else to project their desires onto.

An awful lot of male gaze for a book written by a woman.

In terms of the plot, it’s incredibly repetitive and moves frustratingly slowly. Aside from the two or three main events that take place in this story, there is just far too much waiting around, moving back and forth between locations, and nothing happening for my liking. I honestly don’t understand the point of large chunks of this novel, nor certain characters who do not affect the story or world whatsoever.

I thought the ending was pretty bizarre too. Why did it become a

“where are they now”? And why does it include the most random characters?! Including the cat we were introduced to about 20 pages ago?!? To be fair, I cared more about that cat than I did most of the main characters, but still. A strange choice.

Some people love this book but for me, I can’t help but feel it was a massive waste of time. I kept hoping it would get better, but for 600 pages, it never did. I persisted past where it would have been sensible to give up and in the future, I will trust my DNF instincts.

Content Warnings

violet_viper's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious tense slow-paced

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

4.75

Content Warnings

_david_'s review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious tense slow-paced

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

3.5

I somewhat enjoyed the book.

I liked the niche approach of student choice: the outgoing introverted dark academia type of students of classic languages. This is a group which I can recognise in fellow students from my high school days, who coincidentally also studied classic languages.

The plot is interesting to me. It's a very believable story of a group of people who make very bad choices which seem the easiest to them in the moment, but which have long lasting consequences.

One thing I wish the story improved is character depth. The main character and Henry are interesting. Bunny is interesting but not very rounded. But Charles, Camilla and Francis are underdeveloped eventhough they were part of the main cast of characters. The main character's crush on Camilla also made my eyes roll. It was very over the top and often distracted from whatever she was doing. Her appearance got mentioned waaaaay too often. I'd rather have known more about her personality.

Somewhere around the halfway point the story becomes very slow. You might have to push through long paragraphs about seemingly unimportant details. There shouldn't have been much more of it or I would've dropped the book. Speaking of Tartt's writing style: either do not mind having to look up words or be accepting of only understanding the general gist of a word/foreign sentence and moving on.

The ending was very satisfying to me. The effect of the events in the story are different per character. I found this very interesting to read about. Something clicked when the main character described that the main cast is a group of naturally insecure people who have been taught to feel superior instead. This explains a lot of the behaviour shown.

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