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!

I don't know if anyone's mentioned this as haven't RTFT but I know a few years ago it was discovered that there were significant differences found between the UK and US versions of Cloud Atlas. People hadn't realised there could be such differences between copies.

I said that Miss!

But , at the time, people were worrying about offence to pigs.

Interesting to read about the different editions.
My version didn't have an extra chapter, it ended with the letter and reflections.

The version I read in the 90s ended with her unscrewing the bed head, finding the old diary, hoping there would be a message from Clare, and finding her final message instead, ending on the line "all the remaining pages were blank".

I found it a much bleaker end than Emily's letter and the toys.

I do think I read somewhere that Charlotte Sometimes was originally part of a loosely connected series which might explain the original "extra extra" chapter about her journey home.

@Shortandfat That does sound a bleak ending. At least Emily’s letter is back in the modern Vintage edition, which irritatingly, claims on the back cover to be “The Original Unabridged Text” - only thanks to @nonevernotever we know it’s not!

I think you might well be right about the original ‘extra extra’ text connecting the story to the other two books, which are as far as I recall, very, very different in style.

The first is The Summer Birds, in which a mysterious boy teaches Charlotte (pre-boarding school), her younger sister Emma and the other village children how to fly like birds. It is delightful in a very different way to Charlotte Sometimes.

The second is Emma in Winter, which I borrowed from the library as a child. I don’t remember that much about it but I do remember being disappointed Charlotte wasn’t in it, just her sister, and a pervading atmosphere of coldness and loneliness. I’ve just looked for it on Abe Books and it is rare and very expensive - fall off your chair expensive!

Not in my five year old kindle version.

Thanks to this thread i checked my copy of Charlotte Sometimes and i think it is a (very cheap and yellowing) 1969 first edition.
ends with Charlotte’s journey on the train home, a page or two after the letter from Emily, as in the attached photos.

which is odd, because i’m sure the version i grew up with was the “the rest of the pages were blank” bleakness.

@RubaiyatOfAnyone oh, I have first edition envy! Failing that, I wish someone would reprint Charlotte Sometimes in full.

I remember seeing a blog post by Penelope Farmer about her children telling her there was a song called Charlotte Sometimes on the radio, and how she then met Robert Smith and saw The Cure performing. But it seems sad that The Cure song is so much better known than the wonderful haunting novel which inspired it.

Right, off to write in Henry’s missing quote on page 587 of my 1993 Penguin The Secret History!

@CatChant I've PMed you

Loved this book so much - bought it when it came out after reading an extract in - possibly - vogue or similar in 1992 I guess.

i don’t think I’ve read it since but gosh it stuck in the brain. It was the summer before uni for me so I must have missed a lot through naivety.

must read again!

@nonevernotever I have, with some degree of trial and error, PMed you back.