"Fairytales" revives Andersen's "gorgeous vision" and "terrifying imagination"

[shereads]

"Fairytales" revives Andersen's "gorgeous vision" and "terrifying imagination"

I just started a bicentennial edition of Hans Christian Andersen's Fairytales, which promises to be faithful to the author's dark, un-Disney originals. It's as luscious as dark chocolate. Here's an excerpt from the Washington Post's review:

As the tales progress, the exoticism gradually becomes more spell-bindingly sinister {and the plots} become increasingly infused with melancholy and a sense of the evanesence of happiness...Andersen's teeming and gorgeous vision, his terrifying, willful Romantic imagination, and his blunt, contrary narrative style leave J.K. Rowling in the dust.

From Amazon:

...endlessly experimental, humorous and irreverent, sorrowful and strange. Tiina Nunnally’s sparkling new translation captures—for the first time in English—the vibrancy of Andersen’s voice.

This is enjoyable on more than one level: as literature, and as a treat for those of us who can trace our erotic fantasies to a childhood fascination with the darker aspects of Beauty and the Beast, the Ice Queen, and of course The Princess and the Pea, in which a prince's main criterion for a bride is her ability to bruise easily in bed.



Oh, Don't give me that innocent look. I'm not buying it. Unless you can provide a non-sexual explanation for the popularity of Rapunzel, you read it for the same reason I did: that squirmy feeling in your pajamas that made you wish the story didn't end with her rescue from that big, rock-hard tower.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...104-9373389-2369523?v=glance&s=books&n=507846