Weird mystery about book called "The Secret History"!

[badger2005]

Can anyone help me solve this mystery by checking their copy? It's so weird!

I read this cult-ish book by Donna Tartt as a 20-something year old and distinctly remember a line from it. But my son has just finished reading the book (new copy that I bought him - I've lost my old one), and when I quoted the line to him, he did not recognize it. We checked, and it's not in his book, nor in any version that we can find online! So you'd think that I dreamt this - except that it is also quoted in just one place - a single obscure essay on the book that I found online.

The line is in this part where the college students are assigned a new tutor, and when he tries to teach them something one of the students says (in perfect 'attic Greek'): "Without your patience my excellent friend, we should wallow in ignorance like pigs in a sty". Or something pretty much like that...

My son thinks that I'm misremembering - but how I can be when it also is in this obscure essay? His alternative theory is that this is Mandela syndrome and me and some random scholar are having a collective hallucination!

Yes I have noticed this before OP. The older editions have bits that the later editions are missing. The sty full of pigs quote, and little epigrams and some chapter headers in Greek. I cannot understand why they took them out!

It’s my favourite book ever, I love that 30 years later it still has a cult following and provokes niche little discussions online!

Of anyone had access to Academic library I am sure someone must have written about article or Dissertation about this.

I am guessing copyright. Dropped in one edition /country as they were worried at it/could not find author to attribute/ask permission and then no one followed up to sort it.

Well it's a possibility. It would be churlish of a copyright holder to get in touch to report a breach and refuse permission (under normal conditions) for inclusion in subsequent editions, especially if it was reasonably obscure and the publisher apologized for the oversight. Still better than the misunderstood pigs theory I suppose!

Thank you so much for checking your editions! I am officially not going mad, but still a bit baffled... how come the same 1993 edition both has and doesn't have the quote... ?
Loving the theories, and really looking forward to hearing what pp's librarian can find out... I can't believe the theory that it is because it offends pig lovers, and I'd be surprised if it was taken out for aesthetic reasons because I think it is better with it in - but that's probably a matter of taste.
Someone up thread talked about an essay on the 'inter-text' - that's the 'obscure essay' where I found the line quoted which made me sure I hadn't dreamt it!
The reason I think I remember the line so vividly is because when I read it originally I fantasized about using it myself as a put-down - and may have even tried it for real. Of course I don't speak Attic Greek, so even in my fantasies I said it in English. What a pretentious wazzock I must have been!

Also in my Penguin 1993 copy, on page 616. Bought in Scotland.
Weird, how I've forgotten so much, but remember who bought me this book.
I'm going to read it again, years since I last did.

This is fascinating. First thing I'm going to do when I get home is check my copy.

This is why some don’t like kindle as books update.

Well thanks to this thread I’ve downloaded the book, which I’d never read before.

Another with the 1993 edition and the quote on page 616.

I came back here to check the page reference, opened the book and it randomly fell open at page 616. What are the chances of that?!

I have a first edition of Charlotte Sometimes . It finishes like your puffin edition. The letter, and two more pages about the end of term and her thoughts on the journey home

You’ll either love it or hate it, depending on whether you share Richard’s fascination with the (to him) ‘old money’ glamour of the others in the Greek class.

Well, if Donna Tartt was going to change anything I wish it was the whole business of Charles and Camilla. Try as I might, my brain just couldn't manage to visualise anyone other than the Charles and Camilla as those characters.

Even though Tartt’s Charles and Camilla are beautiful blonde 20 year old twins from Virginia?😀

What an interesting thread this has been. Makes me want to reread all of Tartt's books. I'm a little afraid to, though. They are among the most desolating books I have read. Either no redemption or (as in The Goldfinch) a small, cramped little redemption all sternly bound in with reminders not to expect or pretend more.

Alongside the bit in Jude the Obscure where the lad murders his siblings, the most depressing scene in English literature is the one in which the protagonist of The Little Friend tries to rescue a bird whose wing is stuck in hot tarmac -- and succeeds only in making its plight horrifically worse.

I’ve never liked any of her subsequent novels at all, and having met her once at a deeply odd seminar series at an Oxford college which invited novelists to talk about spirituality and inspiration, I thought she was ghastly as a human being… (But if we only read novels by people we’d like to go for a drink with, it would be a fairly small list…)

Has anyone got the 30th anniversary edition? I would love to know if the quote is in it...I was thinking about buying it, but am having second thoughts if it's not.

That's true. My favourite example of 'awful person , brilliant novelist' is Evelyn Waugh. But there must be many more

@GoodOldEmmaNess "Done because we are too menny" 💔

DH regards that scene as black comedy and intones it when we’re giving a lot of children a lift, and the back seat is over-crowded.

Ha ha! It's not quite the death of Little Nell but Hardy can be a bit over the top with the maudlin stuff.

The line is missing from page 587 of my copy. It says it was published by Penguin in 1993 but I bought it in 2017 so it was presumably reprinted several times but the years in which it was aren't listed.

BadCovers in what way was she ghastly? 😪

I vote the end of Kestrel For A Knave.

Oooh @BadCovers do tell us how she was ghastly 😂!

I always imagined that she would be kind of pretentious in real life, but goodness that book just stays with you your whole life. What an amazing writer!

I studied that for O level about 40 years ago. Such a bleak ending.