![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() And yet, arriving at Bennington already a Secret History fan, I was surprised to hear that what I’d always considered to be one of the novel’s more random, idiosyncratic elements is very real: the snail. Roland recommends to Richard, is open for business. ![]() So much of Bennington, college and town, shines through in Tartt’s “Hampden,” despite the well-applied gloss of intrigue, incest, and homicide.īennington students writing for this publication have described the unique feeling of reading The Secret History on campus: we know exactly what narrator Richard sees when he looks to the ivied clockface on the outside of Commons, or what Judy Poovey means she says it’s a “long walk to Jennings.” Everything is there, down to the most miniscule of details. It’s easy to see how a first-rate literary imagination transformed Claude Fredericks’ entourage of chain-smoking Classics scholars into the Bacchic murder cult immortalized on the page (Fredericks, a giant of the literature faculty, who was Tartt’s teacher, is the obvious inspiration for the character Julian Morrow, the Classicist who casts a dangerous spell over his pupils). Reading Donna Tartt’s The Secret History often feels like getting a turned-up-to-eleven account of Tartt’s days as a Bennington College student. ![]()
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