The secret history - D. Tartt

I really like Borges. I have a book of collected fictions which I stopped reading because otherwise it would be over and then I would not have anything new to read in case I wanted to. I think I’ll end up never reading it, and cradle in the implied no sweeter melodies than those unheard.

But one day some time ago I still wanted to read something and so I decided to do some statistics instead on Aleph and other stories, which is one of his most famous collections, to see if something interesting would come up there. It is a total of 17 short stories, with a median of some 2500 words and a mean of 3000 - a pair are longer. The shortest is two pages long, the longest ones are each 13 pages long in this edition.

What is the common denominator of the stories? Broadly speaking, a paradox, or a twist, The naked paradox or twist is nothing spectacular per se: a labyrinth, except it’s without walls (it seems more a bad idea than a paradox); a man who tells the story of how he’s been betrayed, except it turns out it was the traitor speaking (how cliche). This is the core and the strength of these stories: they are based on an extremely easy concept. Then comes the execution: since the concept at the base is trivial, it needs to be hidden, and even if as a reader one knows that the basic idea is going to be a simple trick, it is of course unclear which of all the possible simple tricks it will be this time. There are many of them, of course. However the hiding cannot go on too long before the reader figures it out, and once figured out the story loses appeal. Similarly, once the trick is revealed the story loses its Existenzgrund. So the stories must be short out of necessity, and they must be evocative, because they cannot be descriptive, because otherwise they would not be short. Also some stories of the first Asimov go in this class.

I wanted to write this because this book by Donna Tartt is somehow the complete opposite. It’s not brainy, it’s not surprising, it’s not even tense - there is no way to keep tension for six hundred pages - it’s the book equivalent of somebody speaking softly and slowly and lightly and you would both want it to never end and to know how it ends. It does take time to describe things and make digressions that per se are not functional to bring forward the plot - but in a way, even the actions are descriptions, because characters are in a sense actions, so you cannot describe a temperament as you would describe a flower. You have to say what a person does and give examples, similarly as the way the description of a flower is an example - in the evening with a summer breeze or I don’t know. I don’t know even know why it has to be a summer breeze and not a summer wind.

According to prosecraft, a website I discovered while writing this post, A Secret History is 200 000 words long, which is 80 times the median computed above. It is stylistically in many ways opposite to Borges, but in a similar fashion I’ll try to read as little as possible so that I never run out of books from her.