How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales: and Other Stories by Kate Bernheimer
My rating: 3/5 cats
this teeny-tiny book opens with a walter benjamin quote:
The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which the myth had placed upon its chest.
and is itself full of teeny-tiny fairy tales, some of which are dark nightmares, and some which are luminous shakings-off of the nightmare.
kate bernheimer is the editor responsible for My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales and xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths, so she knows both her myths and her fairy tales, and she knows how to incorporate the magical into the realism to great effect, either charming:
As the town librarian, I don’t have many opportunities for social contact—unless you count books. I live in a secret compartment behind the front desk: if you pull out the first volume of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women series, the entire wall swings completely wide open—and there’s my apartment.
or creepy:
My shadow learned to walk when I learned to walk, and her first word was also my own. When I lost my teeth, she lost her teeth too. The Tooth Fairy left me a quarter; my shadow left me her teeth—under my gums. Over time they grew in. My shadow was mean, but I always found her a comfort. Besides, there was no getting away from her, that much I knew. As fast as I’d run, she’d run. Wherever I’d go she went, bigger or smaller depending on the hour, but always there like a friend or a horror. And her gray aspect slid toward me from the ceiling at night—a mirror of me made of shadows—even when my eyes were closed I could see her. She had a vague edge, a definite darkness.
my only complaint is that the second story quoted from above is the longest in the collection, and was already included in xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths, which makes a very short book even shorter for those of us who already read it there.
but otherwise, a tight little collection of stories taking the familiar tone and shape of fairy tales, giving us new enchantments to enjoy and even managing to make pink a little terrifying.
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