The Secret History

Mon, 11/19/2007 - 11:56am by jaegerla

For anyone looking for a fun read, definitely pick up a copy of Donna Tart's The Secret History. By "fun" I mean this was a real "page-turner." There's so few new mysteries out there these days that are actually impressive, it made this somewhat morbid book extremely compelling. It may sound like an exaggeration for a modern mystery, but it could be described as "Dostoyevsky-esque." The story is narrated by a pathological liar, and the opening scene reveals that a murder has taken place that the narrator and his friends were involved in. The true mystery of the book lies in what lead up to the murder as well as the narrator's examination of the nature of his college life. The Secret History plays with ideas of guilt, punishment, and social pathology paralleled with everyday apathy.