Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Donna Tartt - The Secret History

Well, Proust-reading resolutions are made to be broken...

Actually, I didn't intend to read The Secret History all the way through - I picked it up with the intention of just refreshing my memory as to how the novel starts, but before I knew it, I was well into the thick of things (in part due to those super-long chapters!) and ended up reading all the way through it, because, well, why not? This was either the third or the fourth time that I've read the novel, and it still has an effect on me. Ah, it's good...moreover, having read the thing so many times (and responded to it so strongly) has resulted in each of its scenes and characters, as well as its overall trajectory, being ingrained in my mind and assuming a kind of heightened, totemic nature - so that re-reading it involves receiving/experiencing the novel as a kind of series of hyper-significant and hyper-familiar figures, closely following one upon the other...or something like that, anyway.