American Donna Tartt writes one novel every 10 years. The Goldfinch*, which secured her last year’s Pulitzer Prize, has been awaited by the literary world since 2002, from the moment Tartt wrote The Little Friend**.
And her debut «The Secret History» brought her worldwide popularity in 1992. This is a detective story about classical American philology, about ancient Greek mysteries in quiet Vermont, about six very original students of one mysterious professor of ancient Greek — and a murder, in Sartre’s simple, even unpretentious and from this even more terrible and incomprehensible.
All three novels are available to the Russian reader, «The Secret History» — even in two translations. And no wonder. Donna Tartt is the author of ideal (in the ancient, Platonic meaning of eidos) novels that have no flaws, novels where the genre is revealed “as it is”, and this first one is significant for her: Tartt herself studied at a college in Vermont in the department of classical philology. But we don’t know about the murder yet.
Translation from English by Denis Borodkin and Natalia Lentsman.
Corpus, 592 c.
* D. Tartt «Goldfinch» Ed. Corpus, AST, 2014
** Foreigner, 2010.