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Leaflet Review: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me

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My Mother She Killed Me ... CoverFirst, let me apologize for my extended absence. I was in the middle of moving across several state lines, and when I got to my new home it took a certain company quite a while to get the internet up and running in my house. Because I’m not keen on composing blog posts while using the internet at Denny’s, I let the blog linger. But I’m back with a series of book reviews on what I’ve been reading for the past month. They’ll also stand in for my weekly roundup this week—no internet means I haven’t a clue about anything that’s been going on this past week or two.

To start today’s review, here’s the copy from the back cover of My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, an anthology edited by Kate Bernheimer:

Neil Gaiman, Michael Cunningham, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Chris Adrian, Lydia Millet, and more than thirty other extraordinary writers celebrate fairy tales in this thrilling volume—the ultimate literary costume party.

Spinning houses and talking birds. Whispered secrets and borrowed hope. Here are new stories sewn from old skins, gathered from around the world by visionary editor Kate Bernheimer and inspired by everything from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” and “The Little Match Girl” to Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard” and “Cinderella” to the Brothers Grimm’s “Hansel and Gretel” and “Rumpelstiltskin” to fairy tales by Goethe and Calvino.

Fairy tales are our oldest literary tradition, and yet they chart the imaginative frontiers of the new twenty-first century as powerfully as they evoke our earliest encounters with literature. This exhilarating collection restores their place in the literary canon.

This collection won this years’ World Fantasy award for the anthology category.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a fairy tale junkie. Base something on a fairy tale and I can hardly keep myself away from it for long. So when I heard about the anthology My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (edited by Kate Bernheimer), I had my eye out for it everywhere. It took a bit of finding, but I got myself a copy.

Overview

The collection is a gem. That isn’t to say I enjoyed every story (the charm of anthologies is that even if you don’t like every story, you’re bound to get plenty that you do like). However, each story added something to the fairy tale tradition. Some stories were retellings of fairy tales; some took a tale as a starting off point; some borrowed character or thematic arcs without matching up neatly on the details. After every story is a short snippet from the author explaining why he or she chose a particular base story and how his or her story was influenced by whichever the “original” (a dangerous word in fairy tales, but most authors pointed to a specific book they’d read as a child as their source).

The stories ran the gamut on genre: fantasy, magic realism, realism, environmentalist manifesto, daily log, and questionnaire all made an appearance. Many of the stories’ tones were dark (the anthology’s title aptly forewarns you of that), some were quaint, and a few really resonated with me.

Favorite Moments

It’s difficult to talk about an entire anthology, so I’ll talk about a few stories. My favorites were “The Color Master” by Aimee Bender (inspired by Perrault’s “Donkeyskin”), “Catskin” by Kelly Link (inspired by Joseph Jacobs’s “Catskin”), “A Day in the Life of Half of Rumpelstiltskin” by Kevin Brockmeier, and “With Hair of Hand-Spun Gold” by Neil LaBute (both based on “Rumpelstiltskin”).

“The Color Master” is about the tailors and cloth-dyers that created the dresses that were the color of the moon, sun, and sky for the princess in “Donkeyskin,” the princess who is trying to invent impossible pre-marital tasks for her father so she doesn’t have to marry him. Unfortunately these tailors are very good at their jobs and create the impossible dresses the princess requires. The main character is torn between her exhilaration at meeting the requirements and her mentor’s revulsion at the attempted incest of the king. The descriptions are sublime.

“Catskin” was uniquely dark and bizarre, and it veered far from the story that inspired it (to be fair, Link says it is inspired by many fairy tales). “Catskin” manages to feel like a fairy tale while telling a completely new and intriguing story.

The Rumpelstiltskin stories are both very different, and both made me think about the funny little man very differently. “With Hair of Hand-Spun Gold” is really creepy, probably creepier because it’s a realist story, but it’s done very well and had my arm-hairs standing on end almost the entire time. It’s essentially the return of the Rumpelstiltskin stand-in character: he has found the mother and her daughter after years and approaches the mother on a park bench while the daughter plays on the playground, unaware.

Final Thoughts

The anthology does what it sets out to do: it displays how fairytale narratives infuse our lives, whether we acknowledge them or not. I was impressed with how the stories stretched and expanded what it means for a story to be based on a fairy tale. Each story gains something because it has a foil narrative—whichever “original” story you as the reader have in your head—and through that foil you interact with the story in a different way than you would if it stood alone. My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me has stories that will appeal to a broad range of readers, many of whom wouldn’t believe they’d like a retold fairy tale. While I didn’t enjoy every minute of the book, I enjoyed the ride it took me on.

A few content warnings to those of you who are considering this book: some stories include rough language, explicit sex, and extreme violence. Fairy tales have a lot of psychosexual themes and many are inherently violent, and several of the anthology’s authors ran that route. If you’re squeamish (which I often am), dip your toes in a story before diving in—skip it if you want to. The charm of the anthology is that there are plenty of other stories if one of them doesn’t suit your fancy.

Weekly Roundup: 10/29–11/4

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Locus Online: World Fantasy 2011 Winners

Locus Online has posted the results of the World Fantasy awards, which were awarded at the World Fantasy Convention last weekend. I haven’t read the best novel (though I’ve read or will soon have read much of the short list), or any of the shorter fiction, but I am in the middle of reading the winner for best anthology, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, edited by Kate Bernheimer. Thus far I’ve found it excellent. My review will come out after I actually finish reading all the stories.

Nathan Bransford: Are You Participating in NaNoWriMo?

In case you writers didn’t already know, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) started earlier this week. If you’re up for the challenge, commit to writing 50,000 words in a novel this month. If you want to get in on the biggest online party the writing community has, jump on the NaNo bandwagon. If you haven’t started already though, you’re going to need a boost to make up this week’s word count. So look to Nathan Bransford’s compilation of NaNoWriMo-related advice.

Publishers Weekly: Survey Says Library Users Are Your Best Customers

This week PW put out an article describing a new research survey that illuminates the contribution libraries make to the publishing industry. Many readers report buying books of authors they have read in the library, and there are a host of other findings.

Liz Castro: Where Should an Ebook Begin?

Ebook wiz Liz Castro explains how to make your ePub file guide a reader to the first chapter of your book when a reader opens it (instead of, say, the cover). I disagree with Liz—I like to see the cover first—but I do agree that the frontmatter of ebooks can get painfully excessive. Outside of the table of contents, I’m a fan of putting what is traditionally frontmatter (like copyright pages, etc.) at the back of the file.

David Carnoy: Amazon Launches Free E-book Borrowing for Prime Members

Now as a part of Amazon’s $79.99/year prime membership, Kindle owners can borrow one ebook at a time, free of charge, with no due date. Kind of like Netflix, but for books, and the prime membership also includes Amazon’s video service. Not all books are a part of the program, as it depends on publisher consent.

Leaflet Review: The Prestige by Christopher Priest

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The Prestige Cover
This is a lamentably crappy scan of the paperback cover.

Over the past few weeks I finally read The Prestige by Christopher Priest. (I have, of course, seen the movie, but that’s kind of irrelevant.) For those of you who haven’t seen the movie (and thus can’t puzzle out what The Prestige is about), I provide the back-cover copy from my paperback edition:

In 1878, two young stage magicians clash in the dark during the course of a fraudulent séance. From this moment on, their lives become webs of deceit and revelation as they vie to outwit and expose each other.

Their rivalry will take them to the peaks of their careers, but with terrible consequences. In the course of pursuing each other’s ruin, they will deploy all the deception their magician’s craft can command—the highest misdirection and the darkest science.

Blood will be spilled, but it will not be enough. In the end, their legacy will pass on for generations … to descendants who must, for their sanity’s sake, untangle the puzzle left to them.

The book is told through a series of first-person accounts that are scattered throughout time: some are in the present (from the descendants whose sanity is at stake) and some are from the past (the dueling stage magicians, i.e. the portion the movie covers). The accounts are mostly written in personal journals, most notably from Alfred Borden (the first past-based viewpoint character) and Rupert Angier (the last past-based viewpoint character).

Narrators with Secrets

The narrators are obviously unreliable. In Borden’s journal he confesses this up front: “The very act of describing my secrets might indeed be construed as a betrayal of myself, except of course that as I am an illusionist I can make sure you only see what I wish you to see. A puzzle is implicitly involved.” Because Borden so obviously hangs a lantern on the fact that he can’t be trusted, it becomes apparent that trusting Angier is risky business as well.

Having seen the movie, I already knew some of the secrets and illusions Borden and Angier would put out there (though Angier’s secret is notably different from what it was in the movie). In many ways, I wished I hadn’t already seen the movie—I wish, for example, that I could regain the initial effect of reading Borden’s contradictory prose without knowing the reason behind it. However, I relished the more intimate look into the minds of characters I already knew (in their essentials). The film does a wonderful job of focusing on the outward relationships the two magicians have and the effects of their secrets on those relationships, but the book brings you closer to the individuals.

Characterization & Fragmented Effects

The prose was interesting, and the characters’ voices and mannerisms were quite distinct. Angier is a penny counter; Borden is an idealist and theorist. Andy Westley/Nicholas Borden (he was adopted, and the Westley name is his adopted name and how he thinks of himself) shows a realistically confused young man; Kate Angier (great-granddaughter of Rupert) delicately captures her childhood experiences from an adult perspective.

Having so many narrators fragments the storyline—which is only more fragmented by the fact that many times you can’t trust what you’re being told. However, except for Andy’s account, each individual gets to go through his or her story, beginning to end, without interruption. I loved this. Each character was engaging enough alone to draw me into the story, and there were secrets and details enough to discover that repeated plot points weren’t redundant. Andy’s account bookends and separates the others’ accounts: because he comes into the Borden–Angier feud as an outsider, it’s almost as though the reader is discovering the family secrets as he does, so his bookending is appropriate.

I immensely enjoyed the book. The characters change, develop, and evolve over the many years of their lives documented within its pages. The story essentially comes down to one of obsessions, whims, and deep-seated aspirations. (It reminds me of English-language Romanticism, Gothic elements and all.) The Prestige, in the end, is a ghost story: the ghosts of whims, the ghost of obsession, the ghost of aspirations of immortality, whether through fame and glory or other means. The ghostly prestiges—the lingering effects of the novel—are the ghosts of human frailty and desire. As such, the book is chilling and fascinating, and it echoes painfully with reality—as nearly all good fantasy does.

Small Gripe

My only complaint would be that there were occasions when I didn’t believe that the words Angier were using were native to his time period and experience. Not to say that they couldn’t have been, but they didn’t ring true in my ear and jerked me out of the illusion of reading for a while.

Book–Film Comparison

As a side note, I couldn’t help comparing the novel and the film, if only to decide if I still liked the film adaptation after reading the book (I’ve watched the movie many, many times because I like it so much). I can’t say that I disagree with any of the choices the adaptation made. Focusing only on two characters made it easier to fit in the time, and focusing on the external effects of their decisions translates better to film and analyzes another side of obsession (as well as answering questions that Angier himself raises in his account). I even agree with how they changed Angier’s secret because it made it easier to get the strong impact without the luxury of time that a novel affords. I’d say I appreciate the film even more now that I’ve read the book (though, as I said before, I wish I could have had an untainted reading of the book—alas, it is not to be).

Christopher Priest’s The Prestige won the World Fantasy Award in 1996.

A Lifetime in a Book

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The Last Unicorn 40th Anniversary CoverThis year the folks at World Fantasy awarded Peter S. Beagle a Lifetime Achievement Award, and I can hardly applaud their choice enough. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn is one of the only books I can consistently say is in my all-time top five favorite books (my opinions toward other books fluctuate so often that I can hardly pin them down with mere numbers).

Like many in my age range, my first introduction to The Last Unicorn was through the 1982 film (I can’t tell you how many times I coerced my mother into renting it from Blockbuster, and she bought the DVD for me a couple years ago for old time’s sake). I adored it when I was younger. Looking back on it now, after having read the book, I’m amazed at how true Beagle kept the screenplay to the book’s storyline while targeting a different audience and using a different tone than he does in the novel. It’s almost the exact same story (with a few cuts here and there for time, of course), but it had a very different effect on me than the novel.

I first read the book in junior high, and I’ve read it almost every year since. Beagle’s prose is masterful (reading the one-line descriptions in his prose is, for me, like finding rubies along the cobblestone path of the narrative). The feeling I get when I read the book, especially toward the end, is the same feeling I get when I look into a star-dusted sky in the wilderness or gaze over the waves rushing toward the rock-ridden coast of Cornwall or Oregon. It’s a beautiful, belittling, empowering feeling I’ve never been able to fully describe. It’s like keenly feeling that you’re just a thread, but also seeing your connection to an entire tapestry. When reading gives me that feeling, I can never forget the book, even if I “outgrow” the age group it’s written for (I read The Dark Is Rising every year too).

The Last Unicorn was the only novel on my AP English teacher’s approved reading list that wasn’t a canonized classic. That teacher, the fabulous Mr. Downs, required “explication” projects twice a term, and the shortest mine ever ran was 12 pages single spaced. They were big projects, and doing them on big books was much harder, so I was able to convince dozens of my classmates to read the 212-page The Last Unicorn. I never received poor reviews back from my referrals.

Since reading The Last Unicorn, I’ve also read A Fine and Private Place, which is a very different type of book but still very eloquent and enjoyable. Beagle was probably the first author who was able to make what could be considered sad or bittersweet endings beautifully satisfying for me. (Other things, mostly short stories, showed me the power of unhappy endings—can anyone say “The Lottery”?—but Beagle made me love them.)

When I started pursuing my English degree, I used The Last Unicorn for as many papers as I could get away with. Not that I ever used the same paper twice, but I just couldn’t help coming back to it with new eyes and new angles.  I projected a new film adaptation, analyzed the onomastics, broke apart some characterizations, got giddy when I recognized another of the butterfly’s allusions, read it as a Christian allegory, and considered the correlation between the Red Bull and fear. I still haven’t run out of things to think about that book; I don’t believe I ever will. Beagle created a book that functions like the magical forest in Grimm fairy tales: you’re always going into the same forest—Hansel & Gretel, Little Red Cap, etc. all go into the same German forest—but the experience is never exactly the same.

In short, there is a lifetime in that one book, in The Last Unicorn alone. Beagle’s other books are fabulous as well, but if only for The Last Unicorn and the lifetime of reading it will give me, I believe him to be fully deserving of the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award.