1 Zakelijke Gegevens

The author’s name is Donna Tartt.
The title of the book is The Secret History.
The book is published in New York by Ivy Books in May 1993. It’s the first edition and it contains 503 pages. This edition is published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
The book’s genre is a novel.

2 Eerste reactie

I’ve chosen this book, because I thought it might be interesting. I first heard of the book at school. When we got a list of recommended books for our list, we also got some books to add to that list, including the secret history. My teacher told us what the story was about and I thought that it would be nice. My mother had read this book also, but then in Dutch, and she really enjoyed reading it. So I started reading this book.

When I got the book out of the library, I toke a fright at the size of the book: pretty large. But once you’re reading you don’t notice that it is that much, because you’re really into the story. In the prologue the main character immediately tells you that he has committed a murder with some friends. So I thought first that the story had to be very long-winded, but that was absolutely not the case. It takes more time for me to read a book in English, but I really didn’t mind about that at all. Once you’re reading, you want to read more and more. I also really enjoyed it, when there were said some things about the culture of the Roman and Greek. That’s because I follow lessons Latin myself. Most of the time I understood what they were talking about, also grammatical stuff, and that gives you really a good feeling.

3 Verdieping

The narrator in this book is Richard Papen. He tells the story when he’s twenty-eight. He looks back on his life when he was twenty years old en studying at Hampden’s university. He is, of course, het principal person.
Richard grew up in Plano, a small silicon village in the north. He hasn’t got sisters or brothers. His father runs a gas station. His mother went to work when Richard got older, answering phones in the office of one of the big chip factories outside San Jose. Richard is a Californian by birth and also by nature. When Richard thinks about his childhood, he’s unable to recall much about it at all except a sad jumble of objects and a certain mood of sadness. So he wasn’t very happy in Plano because his parents didn’t pay any attention to him and that’s why he decided to go to Hampden’s university.
The other persons in the book are the students who also follow Greek.
Henry Winter is very smart and studies very much. He speaks about seven languages. He wears glasses, a strange kind: tiny, old-fashioned, with round steel rims. He is six feet tall, dark-haired, with a square jaw and coarse, pale skin. He might have been handsome had his features been less set, or his eyes, behind the glasses, less expressionless and blank. He wore almost always dark English suits and carried an umbrella often. He walked stiffly with the self-consciousness formality of an old ballerina, surprising in one so large as he. He has got a car and gets lots of money from his parents. He’s an only child and about twenty years old when the story sets.
Edmund Corcoran is a sloppy blond boy. His voice is loud and honking, and carried in the dining halls. Everybody calls him Bunny. He wears the same jacket every day, a shapeless brown tweed that was frayed at the elbows and short at the sleeves. His sandy hair is parted on the left. He has been a non-promoted pupil several times, so he’s twenty-four when the story sets. He is talkative, which annoys most people. He visits lots of party’s and he’s got a girlfriend, Marion. He wears the same glasses as Henry. He’s very curious and he’s got a scar on his forehead. He has got the strange habit listening to very loud music of John Philip Sousa at night. Bunny drinks a lot, so he’s often drunk.
Francis Abernathy is the most exotic of the set. He’s angular and elegant, precariously thin, with nervous hands. He has a shrewd albino face and short, red hair. He wears beautiful starchy shirts with French cuffs; magnificent neckties; a black greatcoat that billowed behind him as he walked and made him look like a cross between a student prince and Jack the Ripper. He even got a pince-nez. He’s also very rich and has got an own car. He smokes and drinks a lot. He’s gay.
Charles and Camilla Macaulay are twins. They look very much alike, with heavy dark-blond hair and epicene faces as clear, as cheerful and grave, as a couple of Flemish angels. They like to wear pale clothes, particularly white. Which is very unusual, because black clothing is rigueur at Hampden. They’re orphans and twenty years old.
The Secret History takes place at the fictional Hampden College, which is a small liberal arts college in Vermont. Its story centers on a small group of overly refined and elite students of ancient Greek taught by an eccentric professor who accepts few students. When the narrator, Richard Papen, a penniless transfer student from suburban California, successfully hatches a scheme to join the group, he gradually becomes privy to the group's secret history: they had accidentally murdered a farmer in their successful attempt to recreate an ancient Greek bacchanal. However, Bunny Corcoran, the one member of the group who had not participated in the bacchanal, learns of the murder and begins to blackmail the others. As Bunny's sanity becomes questionable and he threatens to reveal their secret, Richard must choose whether to side with the group in their decision to murder Bunny in order to silence him.
As told in the prologue, Richard joins the group by killing Bunny. The second part of the book tells how the others handle with the murder. Of course there is a huge search operation and all Bunny's friend are questioned. They are all very sad: neither of them can sleep without getting nightmares and they think about Bunny all the time. But except from that everything goes fine, nobody suspects them, till Francis and Richard visit Julian. Julian shows them a letter that is written by Bunny and tells about the murder on the farmer. Julian thinks it's a sick joke, but then Richard notices that the last page is writing paper of the hotel in which Bunny and Henry stayed in Rome. Julian notices the sign in their attempt to steal the letter and he immediately knows that they have killed Bunny. Julian disappears the next day, which really hurts Henry, who saw him as a father.
Charles starts to drink very much, and is axially always drunk. Charles batters Camilla so much, that she's going to a hotel. Camilla then starts a relationship with Henry. Charles is sinking very deep, and finally he even thinks that Henry wants to kill him. When Francis and Richard come to Camilla's room is Henry there also. Suddenly Charles comes in with a gun. They success preventing Charles killing Henry, but Charles does shoot Richard in his stomach. When the hotelkeeper and his wife arrive, Henry fetches the gun and shoots himself through the head twice.
The contact between the remaining four decreases. Richard is the only one who finishes his study: English instead of Greek. Francis marries a girl; otherwise his grandfather would disinherit him. Camilla takes care of her grandmother and she lost contact with Charles. Richard asks her to marry him, but she refuses him: she is still in love with Henry.
The problems in the whole story are the secrets. In the first part it's the murder on the farmer and in the second part it's the murder on Bunny.

The main theme in the book are the secrets. There are two secrets that will always be kept secret: the murder on the farmer and the murder on Bunny. The book’s title, The secret history, already indicates that there has happened something that will be kept secret forever.

4 Beoordeling

The story was so touching because it’s told very realistic. Richard is first not really part of the group and he needs to explore the secret history. That isn’t very easy, because the other members of the group are all a bit weird.
The passage I liked the most was when Henry tells Richard what happened when they killed the farmer. This is also the most important scene of the book, when this hadn’t token place, a lot of other things, like killing Bunny, wouldn’t have happened.
The lessons of Julian were sometimes nice to read, but after a while they could be getting boring. Because it toke too much time to read it and I didn’t understand it always.
Everybody has secrets, secrets you don’t want to share with everybody else. That is the same in the story. This is of course a pretty grave secret, but it wasn’t really their fault. Sometimes things happen that you don’t like, but you can’t turn that back, so you have to live with the consequences.
The usage of Donna Tartt is mostly not very difficult, but during the lessons of Julian, she used some difficult words. In the rest of her book also of course, but I didn’t payed very much attention to that, because you don’t have to know all the words exactly to understand the story.
I really enjoyed reading this book and I would recommend it to others, though it’s a large book. Because it’s very well written and the story is very good.