![]() The reader is already in on a secret – the novel is then a story of two parts what led up to the death of a classmate, and what happens in the aftermath. From the book's chilling prologue, we know straight away that the narrator Richard Papen and his friends have committed a terrible crime. Part thriller, part coming-of-age campus novel and part Greek tragedy, The Secret History begins with one of literature's most memorable first lines "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". Donna Tartt has since published two more books – including 2014's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Goldfinch – but it's her debut that has made the biggest impression. Thirty years on, it's still in the cultural conversation, attracting a whole new generation of fans through TikTok. Since its publication, it has sold more than 2.3 million print copies in English alone and been published in 40 languages. It became the kind of book people read dozens of times and excitedly press into the hands of others. On its publication, in September 1992, The Secret History became an immediate critical and commercial success, one of those rare novels that makes as much of a splash in literary circles as it does on the bestseller lists. I was writing it for myself and my friends," Tartt said in an interview in 2018. "I just thought I was writing an old-fashioned, very bizarre book that was to no one's taste except my own. ![]() ![]() Here was a book both inspired by and about a love of Greek mythology, a melancholic tale of a group of classics students at an elite New England university who share a terrible secret, told in Dickensian detail. When Donna Tartt was writing her debut novel, The Secret History – an endeavour that took her eight years – she wasn't convinced there would be much of an audience for it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |