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"Tanto è vero che non tocca agli uomini, miseri come sono, ciechi, imprudenti, malevoli, formar dei desideri; e che pochi fra essi son capaci di ben giovarsi dei doni largiti loro dal cielo."
"Tanto è vero che non tocca agli uomini, miseri come sono, ciechi, imprudenti, malevoli, formar dei desideri; e che pochi fra essi son capaci di ben giovarsi dei doni largiti loro dal cielo."
I'm a total mess when it comes to curating my ereader. I check things out of the library and compulsively download books both profligately and promiscuously. I follow one link after another in search of books that might appeal, and almost never make note of how I ended up with that one thing on the queue. And saying I have a queue is an insult to an organized and methodical list of readerly desire, because I pretty much read at whim (when I'm not reading for work) and my whims are scattered far and wide.
So when I picked up The Seventh Bride, I more or less assumed previous me had downloaded some crap that might be fun at bedtime, one of those first person jobs with a Strong Female Protagonist and some sexytimes, the kind where the Strong Female Protagonist spends all her time slut shaming everyone around her and sucking. Hey don't judge! I like getting pissed at my reading so I can get some godamn sleep once in a while. Alas, The Seventh Bride turned out to be well written and interesting. So much for sleeping! Sleeping is for suckers anyway.
Turns out, The Seventh Bride is a retelling of Bluebeard, the folktale probably best known from its telling by Charles Perrault (who also wrote Puss in Boots). In the tale, a young bride marries an older lord of some kind, and is admonished by him never to look in one specific room. (Just fyi, a forbidden thing in a story is called by folklorists a narrative lack, and you can bet your bottom dollar that this lack will be fulfilled in the text.) So too, in Bluebeard: the young wife finds the key, and upon opening the forbidden door, finds the heads of all the previous wives, usually seven in number. Thus, the name of the novel.
The Seventh Bride dispenses with the young wife's naivete. She knows the lord is bad news, but is more or less sold to him because of deeply unfair social architecture. Instead, the novel focuses on the relationships between the wives, some of whom are still living, and some of whom are, well, maybe not dead, but not altogether alive either. Kingfisher does a lovely job of detailing the strange connections between the women. One woman in particular is devoted to her evil husband, and a couple others are so twisted by their circumstance that they are fragile and dangerous in their fragility. This is no rosy sisterhood, but it isn't some bitch-fest either, where our protagonist gets to be Queen B because all women but her are the worst.
Nuanced relationships between women in a fucked up system? Who even does that? Kingfisher does; amen sister.
Эта знакомая нам с детства версия Красной шапочки в переводе Маршака, конечно же, сильно смягчена по сравнению с оригиналом. Вплоть до того, что я вообще не понимаю, зачем здесь на обложке имя Перро. От его исходной жутковатой сказки (в те времена народные сказки вообще на детей не ориентировались, это были просто байки, которые взрослые рассказывали друг другу) осталась только весьма сглаженная мораль о том, что "это опасно - останавливаться в лесу и разговаривать с волками", которую детям как раз и надо.
"Beauty is a fine thing in a woman; it will always be admired. But charm is beyond price and worth more, in a long run. When her godmother dressed Cinderella up and told her how to behave at the ball, she instructed her in charm. Lovely ladies, this gift is worth more than a fancy hairdo; to win a heart, to reach a happy ending, charm is the true gift of the fairies. Without it, one can achieve nothing; with it, everything."
Such words are true to its form but were ignored. The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault is a wonder of its own but some thing that may not be the liking to others. While we all heard the popular fairy tales of Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Puss in Boots and Little Red Riding Hood, these are the true origins from Charles Perrault stories with others like Bluebeard, Ricky with a Turf and a few others in this book. But this... is actually Angela Carter's translated with her view of his stories that is mix with modern perspective. One can say while reading it, the moral values written for each story is just like the above. Its not that isn't true, but some of the stories like Cinderella moral value can be quite stirring.
I still love the stories here, but given a 3 out of 5 star is because I know these stories some how and its nothing new that we do not know about and there are some I have not heard of. While the moral values written as a end story is interesting, I do enjoy her views of each story that she finds Perrault's fairy tales can be some thing she feel a defying moment during she translates them to her liking. Short and simple, it's a children's story for adults even though its meant for children but its seriously, written for adults.
I would use this to counter the Grimm Brothers versions of fairytales. So that the children could see different versions. And we could compare and contrast the stories.
