Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by kate_in_a_book
Angela Carter's Book of Fairy Tales by Angela Carter
3.0
These stories were collected and curated by Carter, not written or even edited by her. So while they share her taste in the weird and feminist, they do not exhibit her writing skill – more noticeably so in some cases than others.
Carter spent many years collecting these stories for what was originally two separate books published by Virago. She sought translations into English, ideally transcriptions from oral storytellers, from all over the world and the result is truly the most international collection I have ever read. For example, the final chapter’s stories are labelled as: Yiddish; Norwegian; Africa: Bondes; USA; Africa: Hausa; Chinese; Surinamese.
The tales are sorted into chapters labelled things like “Good girls and where it gets them” and “Strong minds and low cunning”. The main characters are invariably female and it is almost always a woman who gets the upper hand. There are several variants of familiar tales such as Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, but most of the stories were new to me. I got the feeling there was a wide span covered from traditional centuries-old folk tales to random off-the-cuff jokes.
These stories are not on the whole any weirder than the fairy tales I grew up with (mostly Grimm and Andersen tales and not the Disneyfied versions), though some of them are. What I actually found more noticeable was how universal some themes are.
See my full review: http://www.noseinabook.co.uk/2016/07/17/the-past-was-hard-cruel-and-especially-inimical-to-women/
Carter spent many years collecting these stories for what was originally two separate books published by Virago. She sought translations into English, ideally transcriptions from oral storytellers, from all over the world and the result is truly the most international collection I have ever read. For example, the final chapter’s stories are labelled as: Yiddish; Norwegian; Africa: Bondes; USA; Africa: Hausa; Chinese; Surinamese.
The tales are sorted into chapters labelled things like “Good girls and where it gets them” and “Strong minds and low cunning”. The main characters are invariably female and it is almost always a woman who gets the upper hand. There are several variants of familiar tales such as Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, but most of the stories were new to me. I got the feeling there was a wide span covered from traditional centuries-old folk tales to random off-the-cuff jokes.
These stories are not on the whole any weirder than the fairy tales I grew up with (mostly Grimm and Andersen tales and not the Disneyfied versions), though some of them are. What I actually found more noticeable was how universal some themes are.
See my full review: http://www.noseinabook.co.uk/2016/07/17/the-past-was-hard-cruel-and-especially-inimical-to-women/