Lauren Elkin in The New York Times:
The narrator of the British poet Rebecca Perry’s debut novel, “May We Feed the King,” is an unnamed curator who specializes in historical re-enactments in the rooms of moldering old properties. Like a novelist, the curator sees her job as going beyond what visitors can actually see; she feels it is her duty to conjure up a particular feeling. And so she avoids “generic” scenes of tables piled high with roasts and pies and fruits in favor of something more suggestive: “A small silver fish head on a plate, placed on the floor for a cat?” she says. “That gives us a sense of a person, and begins to animate a room.”
As the novel opens, the curator has begun work on a new project in a 750-year-old palace somewhere in Britain. First she must spend time in the rooms, learn their history, get to know the people who lived in them, come to “inhabit” them “entirely.” Then it is time to look through the ledgers, to see which monarch from which period will be featured.
More here.
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