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The Secret History is a fantastic book and one of my favourites. Reading it doesn't even feel like reading a murder mystery; the article talks about the first l

by stryan 4y ago

The Secret History is a fantastic book and one of my favourites. Reading it doesn't even feel like reading a murder mystery; the article talks about the first line saying Bunny's dead, but really you're introduced to the whole murder almost immediately. You already know who kills him, so the book ends up being a character study about the people who did it and why. I'm a bit disappointed that the article didn't talk about the Dark Academia aesthetic/subculture more. It's been floating around the internet well before TikTok (I remember seeing it back on Tumblr a decade ago, and I was actually first introduced to the book through a piece of fan fiction) and, like cottagecore, I suspect has far more influence on pop culture then people are aware of

bccdee 4y ago
The prologue, which famously begins with "The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation," gets a lot of love. For me, though, I realized I was reading something special in the opening paragraphs of the first chapter: > 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 think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs. > A moi. L’histoire d’une de mes folies. > My name is Richard Papen. I am twenty-eight years old and I had never seen New England or Hampden College until I was nineteen. I am a Californian by birth and also, I have recently discovered, by nature. The last is something I admit only now, after the fact. Not that it matters. > I grew up in Plano, a small silicon village in the north. No sisters, no brothers. My father ran a gas station and my mother stayed at home until I got older and times got tighter and she went to work, answering phones in the office of one of the big chip factories outside San Jose. > Plano. The word conjures up drive-ins, tract homes, waves of heat rising from the blacktop. My years there created for me an expendable past, disposable as a plastic cup. Which I suppose was a very great gift, in a way. On leaving home I was able to fabricate a new and far more satisfying history, full of striking, simplistic environmental influences; a colorful past, easily accessible to strangers. > The dazzle of this fictive childhood—full of swimming pools and orange groves and dissolute, charming show-biz parents—has all but eclipsed the drab original. In fact, when I think about my real childhood I am unable to recall much about it at all except a sad jumble of objects: the sneakers I wore year-round; coloring books and comics from the supermarket and the squashed old football I contributed to neighborhood games; little of interest, less of beauty. I was quiet, tall for my age, prone to freckles. I didn’t have many friends but whether this was due to choice or circumstance I do not now know. I did well in school, it seems, but not exceptionally well; I liked to read—Tom Swift, the Tolkien books—but also to watch television, which I did plenty of, lying on the carpet of our empty living room in the long dull afternoons after school. Profoundly evocative prose. I really love this book.
- stryan 4y ago
  Indeed, "a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs" is a line that's burned into my mind.

by stryan 4y ago

bccdee 4y ago

The prologue, which famously begins with "The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation," gets a lot of love. For me, though, I realized I was reading something special in the opening paragraphs of the first chapter: > 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 think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs. > A moi. L’histoire d’une de mes folies. > My name is Richard Papen. I am twenty-eight years old and I had never seen New England or Hampden College until I was nineteen. I am a Californian by birth and also, I have recently discovered, by nature. The last is something I admit only now, after the fact. Not that it matters. > I grew up in Plano, a small silicon village in the north. No sisters, no brothers. My father ran a gas station and my mother stayed at home until I got older and times got tighter and she went to work, answering phones in the office of one of the big chip factories outside San Jose. > Plano. The word conjures up drive-ins, tract homes, waves of heat rising from the blacktop. My years there created for me an expendable past, disposable as a plastic cup. Which I suppose was a very great gift, in a way. On leaving home I was able to fabricate a new and far more satisfying history, full of striking, simplistic environmental influences; a colorful past, easily accessible to strangers. > The dazzle of this fictive childhood—full of swimming pools and orange groves and dissolute, charming show-biz parents—has all but eclipsed the drab original. In fact, when I think about my real childhood I am unable to recall much about it at all except a sad jumble of objects: the sneakers I wore year-round; coloring books and comics from the supermarket and the squashed old football I contributed to neighborhood games; little of interest, less of beauty. I was quiet, tall for my age, prone to freckles. I didn’t have many friends but whether this was due to choice or circumstance I do not now know. I did well in school, it seems, but not exceptionally well; I liked to read—Tom Swift, the Tolkien books—but also to watch television, which I did plenty of, lying on the carpet of our empty living room in the long dull afternoons after school. Profoundly evocative prose. I really love this book.

stryan 4y ago
Indeed, "a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs" is a line that's burned into my mind.