This might've been ruined for some by the cringier elements of the "dark academia" subculture but Jesus it really is that good. The prose is beyond stunning; it takes rare talent to marry gorgeously decadent language with a genuinely suspenseful, page-turning narrative but Tartt manages it with such fluid grace that it's astounding. This is a profoundly Catholic novel in a deeply felt and intangible way and it's hard to quite explain but it's so very luminous and fatalistic and wonderful. Tartt mogged the tradcath e-girl summit by converting thirty years ago and having the prettiest face. Judy was my fave!
Dust thou art
Aug 17, 2024
9 comments
frantzfanonenjoyer1 year ago
Every fall semester I always make sure to take this with me back to uni, it's actually one of the best cold month coded books ever. When I first got it at a thrift for a buck I skipped classes for two days just to read this.
demiurgelovato1 year ago
I literally blasted through the final 144 pages (I counted) in a mammoth afternoon session. It's so addictive And agreed, I feel bad reading it in August bc it's definitely a very good evocation of the endless Vermont winter
Despite not understanding the penultimate sentence, I agree with this review.
It was a retarded incident that spawned an even more retarded meme last year https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tradcath-e-girl-summit
pseudointellectual1 year ago
"Tartt outdid her competition by metaphorically getting to the top of the 'combining the juxtaposition between traditional catholic femininity and the hyper online brainrot' mountain by doing it 30 years ago before anyone else did and having the prettiest face"
What it gains in comprehensibility, it loses in mystique. But I appreciate this.
demiurgelovato1 year ago
Thank you for preserving the final element, it's the most important one
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Yes, and I think the coziness is what makes the horrors of the second half so much more alarming. Like at first they just seem eccentric but gradually you notice a lurking menace within them (see: the bacchanal) as well as a certain nihilism on Julian's end (or at the very least a degree of pagan amorality) and then that whole last third of the book is just a cacophony of horrors as all the chickens come home to roost at once What was taking Greek like, if you don't mind me asking? I can easily imagine that major getting culty irl too