A Secret Alchemy
Emma Darwin
Seriously, have I not already written about this? Okay...um...the author has a cool name?
Elizabeth Woodville, semi-commoner (and widow) marries a king, he gets replaced, she gets screwed over, her boys get locked up killed, her daughters come out pretty okay, blah blah blah. Never my favorite historical period, although novelists seem to love it. A bunch of flags in the pages though - let's find out why!
P. 44 - what is a "golliwog"?
P. 52 - "It's people whose main use is as inheritors and rulers of land who have power when they're so young. That's why gentrywomen were married in their teens - twelve or thirteen, sometimes - and the boys the same. That's their value." A bit baldly stated, but true.
P. 74 - reference to "Wydvils" - ugh, I got really annoyed by the random ye olde spellings
P. 84 - what is "dripping" - is it gravy? It goes on bread? It sounds gross...
P. 86-87 - "Le Morte Darthur in a late-nineteenth-century art binding and wrapped like all the others in the crackling clear plastic of the antiquarian book dealer. The silvery whirl has spun my mind too. I don't open it, look at the title page, the dates, the colophon. A book's created to hold words, yet words are not what I am thinking. It's the weight in my hand as I take it from him, the corners pressing into my other palm. I turn it over, pull off the plastic clothing, run my finger down the spine, feeling the raised bands like vertebrae and the tooled dips of title and author. Then I turn it again, open it, and furl the pages so they tickle past my thumb, hesitating at each illustration plate, then flickering on, giving off a faint breath of paper and age. Under my palms the binding is smooth and warm and smells of beeswax. The brown calfskin is inlaid with green and amethyst leather and tooled with gold, the colours so cleanly cut that there's scarcely a join to be felt, only the slip from one to the next under my fingers, like the swell of muscles under a man's skin." Gorgeous, sensual description of books - double points for the author on this one.
P. 91 - why would a pilgrim's hat be "cockle-shelled from Compostela" - must check...
P. 227 - Oh my God, I am almost too embarrassed to admit this where someone might stumble upon it one day, but I had an epiphany when I read the phrase "A Dieu" - I honestly don't think it had ever occurred to me that saying "adieu," as a farewell, was related to the whole general, go with God, God bless you family. Ugh. Stupid.
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Apparently a golliwog is a horrid sort of blackface doll? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golliwogg I think the term must originally have just referred to a rag doll, and it's used in that sense in the book... "Drippings" is apparently just the juices and fat and bits at the bottom of a pan after roasting meat, or sometimes just meat fat - which makes sense when I just think about the word, but sounds NASTY if it's something you keep in a jar and then spread on bread. English people are weird. And eat gross stuff. When V and I saw the "diets around the world" exhibit at the Museum of Science (I think the book it was based on was featured in Marie Claire or something too), the Englishwoman's daily diet was one of the worst - totally processed and packaged and yucky. I love how I keep saying "apparently," like I am still skeptical... White cockle shells were *apparently* used to drink water along the pilgrimage route to Compostela, and that's how they became a symbol of the Santiago pilgrims. Well, at least I learned some new tidbits of information, even if the book itself wasn't good.
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