I certainly knew I would love this, but I knew not how much. I start to laugh, sometimes, out loud. Little chuckles that drive the everyday, streetwise composure out of my face. Or it cringes (the composure does) with sudden bursts of pain, my facial muscles flooding with the multitude joys of sorrow or hubristic foreshadowing. People start turning their heads - or so I imagine. But they know nothing of the intricate pleasures that I derive, amongst them, out there in the streets. Out of my ears grow the headphones and, respectively, the wires that are firmly attached to my cell phone. Into my ears, in a very astute and mesmerizing manner, streams Donna Tartt's voice like a dream.
I certainly didn't expect this to happen. I thought it would be a very pleasant ride. Extraordinarily so, yes, but only compared to the vast amounts of ordinariness that surround and encompass everyday life. I fell in love again with this book, this novel, this masterpiece of storytelling. And with the author. It is one thing to love a book so much that you grab it off the bookshelf and start reading random passages out loud until you fall asleep. It is quite another to have it read to you by the author herself. The same author that wrote every single sentence of it and refined them so much that you won't find any flaws in them (except that one sentence on p.321, which goes: 'She was a good girl, a good sport.' Richard would never have said anything like this, maybe out of insecurity, a sly remark to Bunny, but he is not pressured in any way in this situation. But Donna makes you forget this one little inconsistency quite immediately when she goes on:
Sweet chuckles in the dark and her hair falling across my face, funny little catches in her breath like the girls in high school. The warm feel of a body in my arms was something I'd almost forgotten. How long since I'd kissed anyone that way? Months, and more months.
I signed up on audible.co.uk because they offer a free audiobook upon registration. Actually I was going for True Grit because it is the most expensive, if you can think of it that way, of the books read by Donna Tartt. But then I discovered that I am not allowed to download that one from an account - and with billing details - from Germany. Neither was I allowed to download The Little Friend - both audiobooks I wanted to listen to particularly because of Donna Tartt's Mississippi upbringing and native Southern voice.
So the only audiobook of interest that I got for free on sign-up was The Secret History - for personal implications in this novel see my last post. But what I didn't know then and despise of now is this: this audible accounts come with a catch! The files that you are allowed to download are heavy on DRM. To listen to them I have to have a special device, an Ipod or something like this - everything but an ordinary and well-functioning mp3-player - or, the other choice is to burn it to CDs with incoherent chapters that are all, equally, eight minutes long, making a total of about twenty CDs which I wouldn't need anyway, because I have no portable device to play them on.
[Here a little story is amiss that dealt with some things. I'd rather not tell you what it was.]
But one big benefit - [here too, something has been left out] - is that I grasped an understanding of the novel that I wouldn't have gained otherwise. Due to the constant concern about paragraph beginnings and endings I became aware of some aspects of the wider compositional structure of the text. The paragraphs, for example, quite often resemble Richard's state of mind, his level of consciousness. Many start with him waking up or coming to and end with him going to bed or going 'home', to his dorm or, at least, departing from his friends or passing out. The story gets a heavy dreamlike quality this way, as do Richards thoughts and the actions of the group, which Richard often reminisces as being incomprehensible to a rational mind like his own. Which is, of course, one of the main themes of the novel that oscillates between Greek madness and Roman rationality and Richard's "morbid longing" to present everything in a "picturesque" manner, "at all costs." It is also quite on par with Julian's assumption that another, and more precise, word for "psychology" is "fate." It is the underlying theme of classicism vs. modernism. This is the true reason why they had to kill Bunny, after all, to see how far they could push their classicist beliefs onto the modern world around them. How far they could go until the ancient Gods, the Greek Erinyes or Roman Furies "turned up the volume of [their] inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made [them] so much themselves that they couldn't stand it" anymore. And this is exactly what happens in Book II and this is also exactly why Richard remains utterly detached from all the events and the murders throughout the book and thus, ostensibly, stands the test of time. His utter self, his 'fatal flaw' is, as he rightly confesses in the first paragraph, "a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs." This is his madness, and it drives him to consider all the events in this (picturesque) light; drives him to tell us about it in his beautiful words, his beautiful narrative, to generate a morbidly picturesque story out of it. The storytelling is his madness, his obsession, the volume of his inner monologue turned way up so that it spills over onto the pages that we read, driving him "out of his mind" and into/onto the world. "This is the only story I will ever be able to tell."
Last night, when I brushed my teeth and made the usual mess out of spit-and-toothpaste splotches in the washbasin, I realized that one of those had taken the form of a rabbit, long ears and all. I first thought it was Bunny appearing before me, revealing himself to me in some kind of dental-hygiene omen. But before I could make out what he might have had to say I cut my gums with the toothbrush and a bright red drop of blood trickled down my lips, falling right onto the figure where it's eye would have been, rendering it a perfect Albino. Dizzyness washed over me with the boldness of this divine message. When I turned on the faucet and splashed cold water in my face, right before I closed my eyes to protect them from the liquid element about to hit, I saw the rabbit dissolving and tumbling down the drain, it's red eye glaring into mine. When I opened them again, the rabbit was gone. Are you ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?
