The question remains: of all books, why was this the one that inspired our collective devotion? But this logic is circular: we all loved The Secret History because we all loved The Secret History. My friends and I talked about our favourite characters as much as we talked about the members of our favourite bands.ĭoubtless we enjoyed The Secret History more because reading it was a communal activity. At one point, you could barely walk down the corridor or enter a classroom without catching sight of the familiar jacket, stark and black and unmistakeable. Everyone I knew was reading it-first my friends, then other girls in my year, then what felt like the entire school. Even then, I understood that this was the perfect age for it. I first read The Secret History the autumn before I turned 15. It’s hard to embody a new wave of any kind of writing at a rate of slightly less than one book a decade. Since The Secret History, she has written only one novel: The Little Friend, published in 2002. But despite the novel’s huge success, Kaplan’s predictions for Donna Tartt have not come true.
Twenty years later The Secret History is both an international bestseller and cult classic. He labeled her “a precocious sprite… A Wise Child out of Salinger,” and announced that her talent was so great that, “all by herself” she constituted a new wave in Southern writing.
James Kaplan, interviewing the Mississippi-born Tartt for Vanity Fair, noted her ability to self-mythologise, but was happy to further the mystique. Tartt had started The Secret History at Bennington, and it was whispered that her friends there had been the models for the novel’s characters. Bret Easton Ellis, one of the leaders of the pack, had been Tartt’s close friend and classmate at Bennington College in Vermont. Tartt’s vogueish glamour was boosted by her connections to the “literary brat pack,” a young, East Coast group of writers whose tales of drug use and disaffection were, in the late 80s and early 90s, a by-word for literary cool. As an undergraduate, legendary writer and editor Willie Morris had read her work and approached her with the words, “My name’s Willie Morris, and I think you’re a genius.” She could recite poetry, even entire short stories, by heart. She was elegant and miniature (“I’m the exact same size as Lolita,” she told an interviewer) and enigmatic. When The Secret History was published in September 1992, hype had been building for months.
Why does Donna Tartt's "The Secret History" inspire such devotion?
0 kommentar(er)
