thenotes:

Donna Tartt /// The Secret History

For a novel that tangles with such antiquarian questions, The Secret History is chillingly grounded in the bright and terrible real. Rather than a dissertation delivered in rarefied, ontological air, we receive an expansive meditation on what, to put it bluntly, is possible. In the Dostoevskian tradition, that would be everything, give or take—too much potentiality for any one mind to sustain, or even contemplate for long, without appalling effort. And behind the playful life-as-art motif is a colder, infinite hall of mirrors: life-as-life-as-life-as-life …