The Secret History by Donna Tartt
*contains spoilers* History and fiction; story and narrative. In the telling of any tale, as events are given shape in the mind’s recollection, as they’re articulated in the utterances of one’s speech and writing – and even related in silences between – the lines separating history and fiction, story and narrative, become distorted. This is especially so with Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel, The Secret History , which, amongst a plethora of thematic focuses (such as: social morality in context and in isolation; the value and distinctions of [and between] the academic disciplines; how place and time have the capacity to shape us into something we believe to be unlike our ‘self’), confronts the ineffability of experience. Indeed, even under the highly-disciplined hand of the author, our narrator, Richard Papen, who communicates as if he were writing a book, sometimes questions the manner in which he’s portraying the key characters of his tale: ‘Reading back over this, I feel that in some respec...