I'm going to go ahead and post the last couple of things I've written about trying to read Wolf Hall recently (I figure I should try to read it before I see the miniseries? I have until April - which is when PBS is airing it), even though I am kind of embarrassed by them (why can I not appreciate this book that everyone else in the world loves?
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I think my real problem is not that the language is contemporary, or that she doesn't spend time reveling in scenery; it's that when she does mention those things, it's to point out how weird or funny they are. The diction is where I'm finding that disconnect really hard to deal with. The scene that prompted the second post was a scene in which one character (Gardiner?) wants to mock someone (Thomas Boleyn) and play up the ridiculousness of the "theater" that happened between Boleyn and Wolsey. Not only does Gardiner turn the dialogue between them into an improvised play as he tells Cromwell about what happened, but he reports Boleyn's language by using words like "thou," when Mantel avoids that language elsewhere. That just rings as peculiar to me, and kept jolting me out of the scene: there are plenty of things that one Tudor speaker might mock another one for, but using the perfectly ordinary pronoun "thou" is not one of those things! It seems to me that you could ' ( ... )
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