I normally paint myself as someone who will trade a decent plot for beautiful prose, but perhaps I have found my limit for that as being somewhere around 300 pages. I don’t think I’m treading new ground to say I thought The Goldfinch would never end. There is such a thing as too much perfection. Tartt has a magic about her writing – without any obvious brush strokes, you are in a scene – you can see and smell and feel everything. She is a […]
Arrested Development, No Bluths. No, strike that, I refuse to be flippant about this gorgeous novel.
When I read Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History” over a decade ago, it stuck with me for quite some time. I think “The Goldfinch” is going to haunt me even longer. I don’t know how she does it, but Tartt’s writing style is, for me at least, the literary version of an earworm that has no burn factor. I could not stop thinking about this book every time I put it down. I kept bringing it up with people at work. My dreams were screwed up. […]
When You Know WHO Done It, But You Want to Know Why
I’ve been describing this book to my friends as “How to Get Away With Murder, but without Viola Davis.” Except, I’ve never actually watched How to Get Away With Murder, so I don’t think that’s accurate in the slightest. In any case, simply put this book is like a reverse who-dun-it: as in, we know that a group of students murdered one of their classmates right from the get-go, we just aren’t clear as to why or how this came to be. The Secret History […]
“All those layers of silence upon silence.”
My main complaint about the other Donna Tartt book that I recently read — The Goldfinch — boiled down to it simply being too long. The Secret History is similarly long, and dense, and full of rambling descriptions and actions, but I found the story and the characters so much more compelling here. “Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I […]