a gallimaufry

merry christmas!

(Sandro Botticelli, bookless detail from The Madonna of the Book, 1480–81, tempera on wood; in the Casa Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan)

In an attempt to impress my three-year-old daughter I have been indulging in Christmas craftiness this year, without notable success.

The clay stable collapsed.

The Christmas stocking is something only Frankenstein’s monster could wear. I actually have to say, ‘It’s a stocking!’ helpfully, to surprised observers. (Because of course I am too lazy to attempt an improvement. Maybe next year.)

I also made a Christmas angel. But she looks like a zombie, which isn’t quite the festive spirit I had hoped to capture.

But I don’t care! It was all fun.

Merry Christmas! Thank you for commenting here and for writing your own wonderful weblogs, from which I’ve learned so much and had so much fun. May 2014 be magical for you all, filled with books and beauty, of course.

(Zombie! I am not going to show you the stocking)

the three little men in the forest

There was once a series of posts about the Grimms’ fairy tales, which fell asleep for a hundred years. A thicket of thorns grew up around it, and those few who remembered it at all supposed that it had succumbed to the writer’s usual inability to persevere with anything. Then suddenly, one cold winter’s day, the darkest of the year, a new post appeared, like a lovely rose blossoming. Hem.

All was not quite as it had been, however. The writer had belatedly noticed that all the fairy tales had already been posted on the internets, and so she decided that rather than hammer out her turgid retellings she would direct readers to a proper translation of the Grimms’ version, where they could enjoy the stories in their proper forms.

So, ‘The Three Little Men in the Forest’ can be read here, if you don’t have a copy or know it already.

(Arthur Rackham, ‘What did she find there but real ripe strawberries’, illustration for Little Brother and Little Sister and Other Tales by the Brothers Grimm, London: Constable and Co., Ltd., 1917; found here)

It’s a cheerful welding together of two sorts of story, but one that I have found curious. The first is called ‘the kind and unkind girls’ trope, and in it a good, kind girl is sent to do a menial, unpleasant or even dangerous task, meets a magical being to whom she is courteous and obliging, and receives a wonderful reward; her bad stepsister is then sent on the same errand, but because she is rude and horrible what she receives is suitably unpleasant and punitive. A famous example of this trope is in ‘Mother Holle’.

In ‘The Three Little Men in the Forest’, the wicked stepmother orders the good girl to wear a paper dress and go out into the snow to gather strawberries; far from perishing in the cold, she finds a cottage, shares her one piece of bread with the three little ‘elf-men’ who inhabit it, and clears the snow from their path good-humouredly. Consequently, she is bestowed with the gifts of growing more beautiful every day, having gold coins fall from her mouth when she speaks and marrying a king. The bad stepsister, on the other hand, is sent out in furs and with ‘buttered bread and cake’ to eat, but is so selfish and rude that the three little men punish her with the mirror of the good girl’s rewards: she will grow uglier each day, toads will leap from her mouth whenever she speaks and she will die a miserable death.

This trope functions in several ways: by splitting the young girl character into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ it can act as a rather clumsy reinforcement of ‘approved’ female qualities – obedience, kindness, generosity, diligence – contrasted with the terrible fate which might befall a lazy, saucy, bad-tempered wench. In particular, it highlights the virtue of obedience, which I would argue is the good girl’s main characteristic in the story: she is obedient to father, stepmother, little men and husband, in turn. The good sister’s virtues are rewarded with those features which make a girl most attractive in the marriage market: physical beauty (here reflecting inner beauty) and wealth – and with those gold coins falling from her lips, who will listen to what she actually says?

The girl character ‘splits’ again during the second trope, that of ‘the false bride’, which we saw in ‘Little Brother and Little Sister’. Interpreted like this, the girl’s identity is particularly unstable in this tale. Again, the revenant bride is rescued just in time, and in the first edition of the tales, so Joyce Crick tells us in the Oxford University Press edition, the wicked stepmother and stepsister were also left in the forest to be eaten by wild animals. The barrel of nails was added later, and Wilhelm Grimm justified it as having been described in a thirteenth-century chronicle from the Netherlands. The wicked stepmother inadvertently chooses it as her and her daughter’s punishment in reply to the king’s trick question at the end of the story. Why did Wilhelm change it? To distinguish it slightly from ‘Little Brother and Little Sister’?

(Charles Folkard, illustration, ‘The Three Little Men in the Snow’, illustration for Grimms’ Fairy Tales, London: A&C Black, 1911; from here)

It is of course the details which define this story and elevate it above a simple ‘type’: the paper dress, the strawberries in the snow, swilling the yarn in the icy river. It’s always winter before the king finds the good girl and marries her. The forest is the place of magic and testing, as in so many of the Grimms’ tales; for the good girl it is a refuge, benign; for the wicked, it is threatening, where beasts may devour them. But I think my favourite part is right at the beginning (from the OUP edition):

There was once a man whose wife had died, and there was a woman whose husband had died. Now the man had a daughter, and so did the woman. The girls knew each other, and one day they went for a walk together and afterwards went to the woman’s house. Then the woman said to the man’s daughter: ‘Listen, tell your father I would like to marry him, and when I do you shall wash yourself every morning in milk, and have wine to drink, but my own daughter shall have water to wash in and water to drink.’ The girl went home and told her father what the woman had said. The man said: ‘What shall I do? Marriage is a pleasure, but it’s also a torment.’ At last, because he couldn’t come to a decision, he took off his boot and said: ‘Take it up to the attic, hang it on the big nail there, and pour water into it. If it holds the water, I’ll take a wife again, but if the water runs out, I won’t.’ The girl did as she was told; but the water shrank the hole, and the boot was full to the brim. She told her father what had happened. Then he went upstairs himself, and when he saw that it was so he went to the widow and wooed her, and the wedding took place.

Irresponsible fathers are a feature of the Grimms’ tales, but this one is intriguing. He takes the widow’s promises of kindness to his daughter on trust, but not his own child’s observation of the boot: this he corroborates himself. He uses a boot with a hole in it – did he know this, and so really had decided not to marry? Or was he unaware of it, assuming the boot would probably hold the water, and thus quite keen on the widow? In either case, what did he hope to prove with the boot? Or again, was he, in a story where most of the characters lack any great cunning, incredibly stupid? And why in the attic, does he associate that with the head, the brain?

I’m not sure I’ve written all I want to write about this, or finished thinking about it. But life is short, so I’ll post it anyway. What do you make of it?

Next time: ‘Hansel and Gretel’.

(Black-and-white illustration by Kay Nielsen in Hansel and Gretel and Other Stories by the Brothers Grimm, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1925; found here)

Black Milk: On Writing, Motherhood and the Harem Within, by Elif Shafak, translated by Hande Zapsu

The past six months have been a funny time for me, reading-wise. While I have read some amazing books and loved every word of them, I’ve also had uncharacteristic longeurs, when nothing on my shelves (or what I can see of them) fitted my reading mood. During the most recent of these slumps I worked my way through the last year’s archives of Tales from the Reading Room and picked out a few books which appealed to me; when they arrived, I put them safely aside until A Moment of Great Need (approximately two weeks later). Then I settled down with a cup of tea, a poorly, sleeping child and the first of the books: Black Milk. litlove’s discussion of it with Dark Puss, is here.

I am a writer.

I am a nomad.

I am a cosmopolite.

I am a lover of Sufism.

I am a pacifist.

I am a vegetarian and I am a woman, more or less in that order.

That is how I would have defined myself until I reached the age of thirty-five.

Up to that moment, first and foremost I saw myself as a teller of tales. Once upon a time, people like me shared their stories around a campfire, under a sky so wide you could never be sure where it ended, if it ever did. In Paris, they scraped together the money for rent by writing for newspapers. In the palace of a despotic sultan each story earned them the right to live one more day. Be it the Anonymous Narrator, Balzac or the beautiful Shehrazat, I felt connected to these storytellers of old. The truth is, like many other novelists, I felt closer to dead writers than to contemporary ones, and perhaps related more easily to imaginary people than those who were real – well, too real.

That was how I lived. That was how I planned to go on living. But then something totally unexpected, miraculous and bewildering happened to me: motherhood.

Elif Shafak is a very successful Turkish novelist and one of the few who have been published in English. Black Milk is an inventive, witty account of her change in heart from determined spinster to wife to mother and her reconciliation of all the apparently competing elements of her psyche. Within ‘the labyrinth of [her] soul’ is a ‘harem’ of ‘Thumbelinas’ – tiny women representing different selves – Little Miss Practical, Dame Dervish, her spirituality, Miss Highbrow Cynic, her intellectual persona, and Miss Ambitious Chekhovian, the driven novelist. They bicker constantly (and entertainingly) and govern her through uneasy and shifting alliances, oligarchy, monarchy, dictatorship. Later she encounters two suppressed aspects: Mama Rice Pudding, her maternal side, and Blue Belle Bovary, her sensuality. Interspersed with this story are accounts of other women writers – Jane Austen, Louisa M. Alcott, Simone de Beauvoir, Toshiko Tamura, Zelda Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, and more.

(Portrait of Elif Shafak from here; her website is here)

The Thumbelinas might look like a nauseating idea, but in fact I found them charming, funny and the highlights of the book. They allowed Shafak to explore her complicated persona in an amusing but perceptive way. You don’t need to be a writer or, I think, a woman to appreciate her fears about parenthood and its pressures on self-identity. The rest of the book was enjoyable but in my opinion less successful. I found the summaries of other women writers’ lives and the ‘lessons’ they offered Shafak wore a bit thin after a while, some of them felt a little pat. But what really disappointed me were her accounts of postpartum depression and motherhood. After the birth of her daughter, the Thumbelinas are banished to a box by the djinn of postpartum depression, Lord Poton. While vividly described, he offered little to illuminate Shafak’s experience to me and I felt no wiser about the condition after reading it than before. And then, once Lord Poton is defeated, Shafak’s husband Eyup suggests they hire a nanny and it’s the end of the book! What of the conflicting demands – self-introspection against selflessness, restlessness against stability, the energy and time for writing against those for mothering – over which Shafak and I had pondered for so many pages? Do the Thumbelinas really live harmoniously together? How does she manage such a successful writing career, two children (and a husband!) and a life divided between London and Istanbul? Is Shafak suggesting that actually it is easy, after all?

Despite my complaints about the ending, I loved Shafak’s humour, wild imagination and lively style and will definitely be seeking out her novels. Does anyone have any favourites to recommend?

And many thanks to litlove!

Also, happy Friday the Thirteenth...

Sylvie and Bruno: the wrong edition; or, i am an idiot

Cuthbert Vane twirled his moustaches, sucked another deep breath from his opium pipe and with a maniacal ‘Ha HA!’ flipped over another page of the book and slashed his fountain pen wildly through a couple of lines.

At least, that’s what I imagine happened. Last night I settled down to read Lewis Carroll’s lesser-known novel, The Story of Sylvie and Bruno. I had been anticipating this for some time and was excited. I read about forty pages and then I had to put it down because my brain was exploding in sparkly showers of ‘What the HELL is going on?’ It was the craziest reading experience I can remember having.  I could not even enjoy the sections where I understood what was happening because I was reeling so much from the working-out of how on earth we had got there.

Now I appreciate that books are primarily the words they contain; the form of the container is secondary. Still, since there must be a container, I prefer it to be attractive. I like a nice edition, me. Especially a nice second-hand hardback, perhaps a little battered, definitely with an inscription. So why would I buy a bland new paperback copy of Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno when I could have a pretty hardback illustrated by Harry Furniss? (Given to Bertha at Christmas 1904 by Uncle Jim and Aunt Jessie and somehow found its way into the Youth Library Collection of Bromley Public Libraries, since you ask. It is pristine.)

The answer is: because the pretty, old edition is in fact abridged. No, not abridged, butchered by someone undoubtedly fuelled by drugs or hatred of Lewis Carroll or the need for strips of printed text with which to construct blackmail letters to young men who had frittered away too much of the pater’s money at the card table. Someone – the publisher? Abridger? – had prefaced my edition (Macmillan, 1904) thus:

This book, culled from the two volumes of Sylvie and Bruno, contains only the portions about the two fairy children (with the original illustrations) in the words of Lewis Carroll, without any extraneous matter. A few words only have in some places been added or altered, when absolutely necessary to dovetail the different paragraphs together, so as to make the “Story” one consecutive whole. The humour in this book is so unique and fascinating, that The Story of Sylvie and Bruno is likely in this form to become as popular as the Alice books by the same author. The two-volume edition is still published as before.

How Cuthbert must have chortled when he read or wrote that preface. (I feel putting ‘Story’ in inverted commas is profoundly telling.) The result of his frenzied antics with the red pen? An unidentified but apparently invisible narrator, moving between two worlds, neither of them ours. Characters who appear and vanish without warning, who refer to remarks nobody has ever made and things which have not happened and who exit gardens then, as soon as they are outside the walls, exit them again. Why they are doing any of this is anybody’s guess. It’s incomprehensible, like a remembered dream – and dreams do seem to be significant to the novel, but in what way I could not begin to fathom.

Yes, it is my own fault and I should have known better. So I am ordering the paperback as soon as finances allow. If you can recommend a good (paper) edition, please tell me!

(Cuthbert and friends celebrate the mutilation of Carroll’s text: illustration by Harry Furniss from Lewis Carroll, The Story of Sylvie and Bruno; London: Macmillan and Co., 1889; from here)

O.W.L.S.

Shortly after Amazon announced its intention to use drones to deliver books and other goods, Waterstone’s  responded with its own plans for delivery in the future.

Owls.

(Grey owl, from here.)