Tsh Donna Tartt - Blog Posts

She was born to play Judy Poovey if you even care

Henry Winter will ALSO tell you to look at wild ferns, and then push you off a cliff while you are looking for said ferns 🌿

Honestly, Francis and Richard would vibe so much with "The Tortured Poet's Department"-----

Read from page 90 to 112 ☠️

I wish I could read for longer but my habit is dying away~~~

There are so many details in this one book that it makes complete sense why Donna Tartt took a decade to write it

I can analyse it for a decade and still not understand everything and know every detail 😭😭😭😭

PLEASE, someone who has read the Goldfinch message me. I just finished it, and I need to hyperfixate with someone

Imagining TSH characters during the covid pandemic is so weirdly hilarious to me ,like you can't tell me that Francis didn't have one of those super fancy, super useless masks or that Henry wasn't totally clueless about the pandemic until like 5 months into it

I get endless entertainment trying to picture any of the TSH characters doing the 50% of academia that’s just standard administrative nonsense. Henry Winter had all the ego of a famous academic sure, but imagine if he’d lived. This man would’ve reached a point in his career where he would’ve had to upload class readings onto Canvas. Imagine sixty year old Professor Henry Winter trying to come up with an AI use policy.

03/08/24

Played half an hour of chess

Read 123 pages of The Secret History

Studied Latin for an hour

While listening to:-

The Secret History Mini-Rant

I just finished 'The Secret History' by Donna Tartt, and wow. It's really good. I thought it would be a bit overhyped but no, it really is that good--to me, at least--I love how each character is so human. A prime example being Julian. [SPOILERS] When he left after he found out what they had done...it was so cowardly, so disgusting...and so *him*. I don't know, overall, amazing characters, amazing plot...and I still can't help but romanticize it at times. We never learn I guess...

Congrats to me for my first long post/rant.

Az

um... excuse me. Did Richard understand, or like did he go back and realise what Francis said or what.

Is he dumb? Cause I could see that...

or is Francis just horny in several obscure languages

‘Wait.’ His voice was cool and Bostonian, almost British. I turned around. ‘Are you the new neanias?’, he said mockingly.

The new young man. I said that I was.

‘Cubitum eamus?’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

Okay but since it's canon that Bunny is dyslexic I have a headcanon that he totally mispronounced greek words for years till he heard Henry, then he pretended like he knew what he was saying the whole time. Bitch is only there through force of character.

Francis Abernathy

The Tormented

The following art contains spoilers from the book.

To be fair, they are students. I can attest to the accuracy of the representation.

Love how everyone in The Secret History is always either drunk or high. Or asleep.

“She was still a girl, a slight lovely girl who lay in bed and ate chocolates, a girl whose hair smelled like hyacinth and whose white scarves fluttered jauntily in the breeze; a girl as bewitching, and clever, as any girl who ever lived.”

― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

Just finished it. I am flabbergasted by how good it was !

I finally can stop feeling ashamed of cutting my own hair with scissors.

I started reading The secret history by Donna Tart.

You can’t stop me now.

I’ll devour each letter typed on these pages relentlessly.

putting charles last in the tags because I hate him the most

tsh but it's not the secret history it's actually thyroid-stimulating hormone

I need a secret history that takes place in the summertime

I love it to death but the mood and settings are not in agreement with the current climate I’m in

I often think about how important the setting was for The Secret History.

Had the events taken place away from the large sums of money and aesthetics of Hampden College and New England, people would not be so quick as to obsess over and ultimately glorify the characters.

The copious wealth of the characters renders us to oftentimes dismiss the drug use, abuse, and literal murder committed throughout the story. I’m certain that had the setting, and class of the characters been different, the novel would have been received much differently.

But alas, that was one of Donna’s points when writing the book, and I’m just a girl who likes to read.

instead of studying, I made a terribly compressed chart of the secret history characters and their dynamics by the end of the book: [TSH SPOILERS!!!!]

Just finished reading the secret history and lemme tell ya, the moment I reached 450 page mark- it was a whole another moment. audibly yelled, "what, what the fuck, what the fuck is happening" at what the fuck was happening.

Part 4

Part 3

Tsh as onion headlines part 2

when u pull up to the 'unreliable narrator' competition but nobody's there

turns out Richard Papen subtly implied it was now and u unquestioningly believed him but really he won hours ago

Richard papen loser of all time

Got shot and was too awkward to tell his friends then turned out they didn't even care

Some TSH analysis, uncategorized

julian calling the greek class (minus bunny and richard) "magpies" is so fun to me bc . while they are symbolic of intelligence and resourcefulness they are also symbolic of deceit and opportunism

richard didnt eat his lamb chops at his first dinner with the twins and bunny ate richards chop instead . lamb could be a religious ref to following, how richard is not quite yet in the thick of it with the group, not yet a follower of henry/andor julian . but later in the book he does eat lamb in camillas room at the hotel if i remember correctly , perhaps he is consuming his own innocence, his own morality . finally accepting his role as a follower maybe . also something to do with morality

Henry as death, as Satan/the devil (Richard has described him as Satan, some girl at a party said the greek class were all devil worshippers and Who do they worship except Henry)

Rot and death, particularly rotting fruit -- something about opulence and overindulgence: richard says in his notebook from when he was 18: “There is to me about this place a smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death-those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement-been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death” and then the first few days at hampden (literally 2 pages later) “stunned and drunk with beauty ... Trees creaking with apples fallen apples red on the grass beneath, the heavy sweet smell of apples rotting on the ground”

Richard first name John:  john the apostle . outlived all the other apostles .beloved . follower . etc . interesting the things that could be associated with that; john also means “graced by god”so that could also be looked into; could be that richard abandoning his given name that he has abandoned any grace that could have been given him . could be that he is the apostle to Henry in a way that the others weren't .... could be he has fallen from grace; extremely interesting to me that richard as a name has zero biblical references and means "brave ruler" . something something about the front richard was putting on . the grandiose he wanted so badly to imitate but in the end couldnt and he will always remain but a humble john follower and apostle . perhaps

why is Richard sickly for like 95% of the book he's always complaining about being exhausted and faint and nauseous and riddled with headaches and his solution is LETS HAVE MORE PILLS AND ALCOHOL??

LIKE SIR PLEASE JUST EAT A VEGETABLE IM BEGGING U

the real question is how has nobody overdosed yet

"how about a kiss for your jailbird brother" 😀