So THAT'S what was going on!

[rachelmanija]

There's a funny bit in Biggles Fails To Return in which Ginger, impersonating a Spanish onion-seller in Monaco, shares some bread and an onion with a local. The local nearly spits out the onion, appalled at its sharpness, and asks Ginger where the heck they came from. Ginger is forced to quickly come up with an explanation of why he has English onions rather than the presumably sweeter Spanish ones.

I've been reading books for more than forty years, and this is the first time I realized that when characters take nothing but a loaf of bread and a raw onion as journey provisions, or eat bread and a raw onion for lunch, they're eating something like a sweet Vidalia onion, not the onions that make your eyes water and would be torture to eat whole and raw. I did vaguely wonder why they were always eating raw onions rather than, say, a raw turnip that at least wouldn't be actively painful to eat, but I supposed, without really pausing to interrogate it, that people in times past were so horrendously deprived that eating a raw onion for lunch barely registered!

This made me think about other bits in books that make more sense with context, whether that context is new information, other books, or just more life experience.

In The Once and Future King, the boy Wart, who will become King Arthur, is going on and on about the glory of fighting. Merlyn argues with him, then "seems to change the subject" and asks Wart which he had liked better, the ants or the wild geese. The chapter ends there. When I read the book as a child, I took that literally: Merlyn was frustrated with the Wart and changed the subject.

When I re-read the book as an adult, I realized that the geese were peaceful and didn't believe in national boundaries, and the ants were totalitarian and had the motto "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." Merlyn wasn't changing the subject, he was winning the argument... but the Wart, like me, missed the point.

More recently, I listened to Watership Down on audio, read by Peter Capaldi. I had mixed feelings about his performance, but while listening I suddenly understood something that I never had before, and I must have read that book twenty times.

In the warren of the shining wires, Silverweed recites a poem. It's quite beautiful and initially seems fantastical, with a rabbit asking to accompany the stream and become rabbit-of-the-water, accompany the falling leaves and become rabbit-of-the-earth, accompany the wind and become rabbit-of-the-wind. Finally, he openly asks to join Frith and die. Fiver is horrified at the poem (the others don't understand it) and says it's taking something true (all rabbits must die) and making it into something twisted and perverse (making the pursuit of death seem beautiful).

I always wondered about that poem. The final verse is straightforwardly what Fiver says the whole poem is about, but the earlier verses aren't clearly about death - they seem much more in the vein of other rabbit legends where magical things happen. I had puzzled over it, and finally decided that they're in the real world, so asking to be a magical being like a rabbit of the water or a rabbit of the earth was asking to go to the magical realm after death. But that never felt quite satisfactory to me.

Then, listening to Capaldi read the poem, I suddenly understood. Silverweed is talking very poetically about something that isn't a fantasy or metaphor at all. When he says he wants to go down with the leaves and be rabbit of the earth, he means that he wants to die and have his body decay and literally become part of the earth, and eventually, as it breaks down more and more, the water and the air. No wonder Fiver was horrified!

Have you ever understood things in books long after you first read them?

Comments

[swan_tower]

Probably because of how young I was when I first read it, it took me an embarrassingly long time to notice the plot relevance of the pictures Polly helps Tom pick out in Fire and Hemlock.

I also didn't get the onion thing for the longest time. In the movie Holes, they just start chowing down on onions and smiling, and even though I think they say the onions are sweet, it made no sense to me. I knew onions came in different colors, but since I didn't start cooking until a few years ago, I paid zero attention before then to the difference in taste.

[pauraque]

When I reread Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones, I realized there were a number of things I hadn't fully understood when I read it as a kid. One that went completely over my head was why Sirius went into a panic when the kids tried to give him a bath. I thought it was just that dogs sometimes don't like baths, and it only dawned on me as an adult that he was afraid of the water because he'd nearly drowned earlier in the book.

[cupcake_goth]

I have read Dracula more times than I can count, and it was only in one of the recent rereads that I caught a line in one of Jack Seward's journal entries: [Renfield speaking]"I shall be patient, Master. It is coming -- it is coming -- it is coming!" So I took the hint, and came too.

ORLY, DR. SEWARD?

[sholio]

I'm sure I've had this experience frequently when reading books as an adult that I had originally read as a child, though I don't have a lot of specific examples that come to mind. It's often things like having insight into character motivations that I didn't have the experience to understand before. One that I do remember was that I somehow read a number of Dick Francis books as a young teen without ever picking up that they're set in England - I read a lot of horse books at that age, and I just somehow assumed that it was the Kentucky-Tennessee horse racing region, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. When I first read one of his books as an adult, within about three pages I was like "huh, he's writing about England this time" ... and then caught on that they're all set in England (very obviously so), but apparently every last geographical clue completely flew over my head at age 13.

[darchildre]

The Christian allegory nature of Narnia went completely over my head when I read the books as a child. I was raised Methodist, went to church every week, knew about Jesus, all that jazz, and totally missed who and what Aslan was supposed to be. In fact, I misread the books so badly that they accidentally became the impetus for my first early fumblings with the ideas of polytheism and nature worship. It was very "Aslan is clearly a god, and he's obviously not Jesus because he's a big talking lion and they would have told me in Sunday School if Jesus was a big fuckoff lion, so there could be gods that aren't Jesus. And also here's Bacchus over here, that's cool, tell me what a naiad is again?" This was all very formative.

And then I reread the books later throughout my childhood, with a much greater understanding of how symbolism and allegory work and realized that they were Christian as hell (if you'll pardon the pun) but it was too late - C S Lewis had already made me a pagan.

[sovay]

Have you ever understood things in books long after you first read them?

Absolutely. It's one of the reasons I enjoy talking about childhood re-reads or touchstones with other people. I read a ton of formative books when very young and stuff is still falling into place all the time. This is an excruciatingly old post, but gives a pretty decent history of the phenomenon with DWJ's Howl's Moving Castle (1986). Since making that post, it has also registered on me that it's hilarious that Wales is the secondary world from Sophie's perspective, given how often Wales is/was associated with the fantastic in children's and YA literature and here the point is that it's relentlessly mundane, at least to Howl and the reader in the know, however strange it is to Sophie interpreting it through her own lens of Ingary. Also I did not know when I was in elementary school that DWJ had not written John Donne's "Song," but that was a recurring feature with quotations.

I think it's really cool that Capaldi's delivery was what made Silverweed's poem click.

[mildred_of_midgard]

If I say this is me and every single book I've ever read or ever will read, that's probably an exaggeration, but, uh, yeah, it happens to me a lot.

I made this post about this subject, with several examples, and this one on American Gods.

It's how cahn and I met! If it weren't for Cahn, I still wouldn't know those two characters were the same person.

I hit another one a few days ago, in Little Town on the Prairie (I get bored while I eat, so I like to use my phone at the dinner table to flip through old favorites that I don't have to concentrate on):

“Well,” Laura began; then she stopped and spun around and round, for the strong wind blowing against her always made the wires of her hoop skirt creep slowly upward under her skirts until they bunched around her knees. Then she must whirl around and around until the wires shook loose and spiraled down to the bottom of her skirts where they should be.

As she and Carrie hurried on she began again. “I think it was silly, the way they dressed when Ma was a girl, don’t you? Drat this wind!” she exclaimed as the hoops began creeping upward again.

Quietly Carrie stood by while Laura whirled. “I’m glad I’m not old enough to have to wear hoops,” she said. “They’d make me dizzy.”

“They are rather a nuisance,” Laura admitted. “But they are stylish, and when you’re my age you’ll want to be in style.”

I always thought Laura was being incredibly oblivious, and, like...she was. But I'm now convinced there's no way that juxtaposition wasn't intentional humor on the part of adult Laura and/or Rose!

CN: adult male writer talking about a teenage girl in a gross and very sexualized way

[sabotabby]

This is the dumbest example but I might as well confess.

Exodus by Leon Uris, in addition to being a work of horrific propaganda, had this weird line right in the beginning where a male character is thinking about a female character who got hot. He describes a bunch of puberty-type changes and then says "the sweater popped out and the ugly duckling became a swan."

This line absolutely baffled me as a 12-year-old because I couldn't really conceive of sweaters being a sexy garment, and I just envisioned this girl suddenly deciding to pop a sweater out of her drawer because it had been too sexy to wear before? Or maybe she'd been tucking it into her jeans and now she was not doing that anymore, but that still didn't read as more sexy, though keep in mind that grunge fashions were becoming a thing around this time.

It took me until adulthood to realize that this was about (I should reiterate, a teenage girl) growing boobs that made her sweater "pop out."

Fuck that was a bad book.

[sabotabby]

Oh, this is a less embarrassing one. I got a lot of the humour in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy even though I read it first as a little kid, but not everything, and this was before there was an internet so I couldn't look stuff up that I didn't understand.

So this line:

"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.”

I didn't know that what we call crosswalks are called zebra crossings in the UK and I was confused at why there were special places for zebras to cross the road, as I was pretty sure there weren't a significant number of them in England.

[cyphomandra]

There’s a bit in an Antonia Forest book where a character appears to get away with something and someone yells that they will get him tomorrow, and then the narrative says “but once in every lifetime, tomorrow never comes”. I interpreted this as some sort of vague aphorism about evading consequences and (despite subsequent plot events, which should have given me a strong hint!) it was years later that I realised she meant death.

[ratcreature]

I never realized eating raw onions is some kind of trope. I don't think I ever noticed that in a book. Now I wonder whether translators specify the kind of onion they mean when translating that (in German the sweeter ones are generally called "Gemüsezwiebel" i.e. vegetable onion, while the default onion is the English type).

I don't often reread books, so I probably don't realize what I missed. I can't think of concrete examples, but not infrequently I've only picked up that something was some kind of cultural reference I've been unaware if after seeing it multiple times. Like Dr. Seuss books or such. Those aren't a childhood classic here, so I just had never heard of these. And sometimes it's obvious that something is a reference you are missing, but often I just don't notice. Especially pre-google I could have really used the thing you get with some older classic literature editions, where they have footnotes pointing out everyday reference contemporaries would just have known as their pop culture.

[sovay]

but I supposed, without really pausing to interrogate it, that people in times past were so horrendously deprived that eating a raw onion for lunch barely registered!

I meant to add that I don't like any raw onion regardless of sweetness or sharpness—I will pick slices of raw Vidalia off a sandwich just as carefully as slices of red onion—so it never occurred to me to think very much about people eating onions raw in stories, since I had written it off as just another thing that other people I liked and I didn't, and therefore I might also have made Ginger's mistake.

[wpadmirer]

I honestly can't remember, but I can certainly see how it would happen. Especially with these examples.

[armiphlage]

That bit about onions just made several scenes make sense!

[musesfool]

I have had this experience more than once though nothing specific is coming to mind right now, but all this talk of onions as old-timey snacks is making me think of Grandpa Simpson: "So I tied an onion to my belt which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days nickels had pictures of bumble bees on them. Gimme five bees for a quarter, you'd say. Now was I... Oh yeah! The important thing was that I had an onion tied to my belt at the time. You couldn't get white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones."

[lilacsigil]

I always assumed pickled onions, because my Scottish dad and grandparents loved them. Obviously all British people eat pickled onions constantly!

Then there's (thankfully) former Prime Minister Tony Abbott famously chowing down on an onion and it is indeed a strong brown onion.

[selenak]

The early DS9 episode which introduces then-Vedek Winn where she incites an uproar about Keiko referring to the Prophets as "Wormhole Aliens" in school. I mean, I knew back then that Darwin once upon a time had been controversial, but in my head I safely assigned said controversy to the 19th century. Back in the early 1990s, I had no idea religion-based arguments about what should or shouldn't be taught in school were still a thing in the US, let alone an idea of just how powerful Evangelists were. (And even less an idea of what was to come.)

[qian]

I had a lot of these as a kid because of reading books whose cultural context were quite far from mine. Eg for years I had the vague belief that Enid Blyton's Five Find-outers, who are always eating macarons, were eating uncooked macaroni. Just going crunch crunch crunch!

I found it interesting how you read the Watership Down poem. If I understand you correctly, your original reading was that becoming rabbit-of-the-wind is obviously a metaphor for death, but not becoming rabbit-of-the-earth or rabbit-of-the-water?

Also I know several people who love eating raw onion -- in Malaysia satay is served with raw onion on the side and my mom will eat the whole bowl, and they're not particularly sweet onions. So that epiphany re sweet onions would never have struck me if not for this post!

[puddleshark]

I'm sure this happens to me a lot, but the only example I can think of is botanical.

In CJ Cherryh's Rider at the Gate, there's a scene where the riders are sheltering in the snow under hemlocks... which are a sort of umbellifer in this country (like Queen Anne's Lace, only poisonous).

It was only years later that I came across Western Hemlock in an arboretum, and realised that no, the riders were not sheltering under some sort of giant umbellifer.

[recessional]

Tolkien is genuinely a different experience after having done early mediaeval history with heavy use of primary sources you have to translate yourself.

Shakespeare’s also very different when one has a really SOLID sense of his era’s social history - not the disconnected soundbites they occasionally give but SOLID, like knowing eg what the social perceptions around “what age should people get married/have even a political marriage consummated” actually were (spoilers: much older than most people think).

[mildred_of_midgard]

Oh, lol, another one I remembered.

Diana Gabaldon has a prostitute teaching the new girl the tricks of the trade in Voyager.

"Newest lass takes the one no one wants," she informed me.

"Stick your finger up his bum," Dorcas advised me. "That brings 'em off faster than anything."

Younger me: Well, yes, it sounds very unpleasant to have a finger up your butt, and I'm sure it'll get him off of you quickly, but..won't he complain to the madam? I'm sympathetic to your desire not to have sex with him, but aren't you getting paid to not make it unpleasant for him?

Older me: OH. Wow, who knew men had prostates and often find that arousing? Definitely not me at 15! And I certainly didn't know "bring someone off" was slang for making them orgasm.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Rachel, you can now join cahn in the list of people who started a post on one topic and had it hijacked by me and another person talking about history. Frederick the Great salon began life as an opera post! ;)

[ethelmay]

I know this is a humongo thread, but I just thought of the best example. When we were reading Sons and Lovers in college, there was a bit that went like this: '"I know it's a lot to ask," he said; "but there's not much risk for you really—not in the Gretchen way." ' I assumed that "in the Gretchen way" meant some sort of workaround that wouldn't get her pregnant, and when he says later on, "You are always clenched against me," I assumed that meant they were having anal sex. But I just couldn't ask the professor about it in order to make sure, though it seemed odd to me that a ladylike character would know some weird slang for anal sex. Of course it turned out that "in the Gretchen way" was modifying "risk," and meant that what happened to the character Gretchen in Goethe's Faust would not happen to her (according to Paul, anyway, I forget if Miriam really does avoid pregnancy).

[sheron]

It is only after being told this as an adult that I understood that Narnia books (that I've read a million times as a child) have something to do with Christianity and apparently Aslan is a metaphor. I haven't re-read the books since then, so I can't say how much the realization would change for me, but that was quite a big "oh really" moment.

[minoanmiss]

This is a glorious and educational discussion! I wish I had more examples to add beyond the usual "now I know what that bit of British vocabulary means" and "oh he was *naked*" realizations.