Tring Book Club - The Great Gatsby and The Secret History

The Great Gatsby was a very different book than I thought it would be, but in a good way. It's reputation as F. Scott Fitzgerald's American classic had me believing it would be heavy, long and powerful, but what we get is a light, brief and delicate story of the decadence of the New York rich. Gatsby himself is a sympathetic character, as he has no real friends and is basically estranged from his family. He is a peripheral figure at his notorious parties, and hangs on to our young narrator Nick Carraway in the absence of anything more intimate. Nick is an engaging character, in awe of his rich friends, but not stupid enough to not know their faults. Fitzgerald's writing has a light and easy feel, how clever he is to make such a flimsy story so satisfyingly grand. Tom, Daisy and Jordan are all interestingly flawed, the common Wilson's are the counterpoint to their grandeur. I enjoyed it very much.

It was quite daunting for me, I had not read a novel of over 600 pages for a very long time. But Donna Tartt's The Secret History is a wonderful book is not one word too long. I know nothing about Ancient Greece, the language or Greek Gods, but the class in that mysterious subject that our narrator, Richard Pappen, joins is never less than absorbing. The setting is Hampden College, Vermont where Richard is amazed to find a class of only five other students and a maverick tutor. We know from the Prologue of two pages, that one of them is killed, and the first half of the book describes the events that lead up to his death. Life on campus is always entertaining, but even more so are the places where four of the six live outside college. The dialogue is smart and brilliantly written. The second half of the book covers the period after the death, as the lives of the remaining five begins to unravel. They are in for a torrid time. Donna Tartt has produced an outstanding piece of literature, a Greek Tragedy indeed.