Room in Aunt’s House

A room from Walker Percy’s The Movie Goer.

“The room is a beautiful room and by every right a cheerful room, with its walls of books, its bokhara glowing like a jewel, its blackening portraits. The prisms of the chandelier wink red in the firelight. Scattered over the satinwood table is the usual litter of quarterlies and rough-paper weeklies and, as always, the great folio The Life of the Buddha. My aunt likes to say she is an Episcopalian by emotion, a Greek by nature and a Buddhist by choice.”

I have no especial observation about this. Satinwood can refer to Zanthoxylum flavum or Chloroxylon swietenia. Bokhara seems to refer to a sort of rug (see) which is named after this region and city in Uzbekistan. “The Life of Buddha” seems to be a specific book, but my searches have not uncovered it.

Tags: new orleans, satinwood, bokhara, portraits, chandelier, rough-paper, folio, us south, table, books