My Mother, She Killed Me, My Father, He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales Edited by Kate Bernheimer (A Review by Marcella Prokop)

Penguin Books, 2010

543 pages, $17

One of the delights in reading fairy tales as an adult knows that the story isn’t real, but finding truth in it anyway.  Memorable for their (mostly) all-but-happy endings, fairy tales are like horror movies we must read to get into. And the authors and stories collected in My Mother, She Killed me, My Father He Ate Me are a grand spread for the senses, their lyrical prose and vivid descriptions bringing childhood dreams to life yet again.

“More than once there was a soon-to-be old woman, who had a loaf of bread,” writes Kellie Wells in “The Girl, the Wolf, the Crone.” Evil as suspected, the hag passes the loaf along to her daughter, “the one with cheeks the appalling color of let blood,” and Wells’ contemporary re-visioning of “Little Red Riding Hood” is off and running. The twist to this tale is a dreamt-of salvation for the wolf. As “Little Miss Red Cheeks” sucks him down, littering the bed with his bones, he wishes for the “saving catholicon” of the bread seen earlier. Be warned, evil mothers and lecherous men: not all good girls gone wrong end up in the beasts’ stomach (but maybe the gutter).

Because editor Kate Bernheimer (founder and editor of Fairy Tale Review) sought to catalogue “the thousands of stories written by thousands of writers over hundreds of years,” (but had only this one, 543-page shot at doing so), each tale brings to life the fears and dreams of another time and culture, reshaped with purpose by today’s authors.

“I have a sense that a proliferation of magical stories, especially fairy tales, is correlated to a growing awareness of human separation from the wild and natural world,” Bernheimer writes in the introduction. “In fairy tales, the human and animal worlds are equal and mutually dependent. The violence, suffering and beauty are shared.”

In a world of two-job careers, commute times and advanced technologies, it is often difficult to connect with the broad imaginations we had as children, when we first heard these tales.  What this compilation achieves is an understanding that in reinterpreting fairy tales, we can better understand the world and the entities with which it is shared. We can come to terms with the facts of incest, death, change, and love.  These narratives help make sense of the world and the fears we all share as beings on this planet.

Bernheimer’s assemblage of fairy tales are reinterpreted from originals spanning more than 10 countries; the country of origin and original title run alongside authors such as Neil Gaiman, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, John Updike, Joy Williams and more. Each story includes author comments at the end; this makes for a balanced combination of entertainment and education.

From Vietnam’s classic, “The Story of the Mosquito,” we are personally reminded of the value of all good literature: the characters and situations could be our own, were the locations and names no different. “This is a story like all other magic stories,” begins author Lily Hoang. “Don’t be fooled. Just because our characters have different names does not make them fundamentally different from the archetypical characters you’ve come to know and love.”

Hoang’s protagonist is a beautiful, greedy woman named Ngoc. Her husband, Hein, sacrifices his own blood to bring his wife back after death. In the end, of course, this sacrifice is not enough and Ngoc becomes the bloodthirsty mosquito.  “If only we’d taken the time to change the names, you would have never known the difference,” Hoang concludes, because mosquitoes are everywhere, and everywhere, they are greedy and unforgiving.”

One of the best parts of this collection is the inclusion of tales from other lands, but for those who miss their old bedtime friends, the inclusion of Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel and Rumpelstiltskin delivers. But because this is a contemporary expression of familiar stories, even such well-known figures and tellings are subtly changed.  Or in the case of Rumpelstiltskin, it is actually more than a subtle change. Germanic in birth and a child of those Grimm brothers, Rumpelstiltskin is half a man in author Kevin Brockmeier’s story, “A Day in the Life of Half of Rumpelstiltskin.”  Written in diary format, straight narrative and Mad-Lib “name, color, occupation, blank-line styling, Brockmeier’s story begins with Rumpelstiltskin waking up from a dream.

“7:45 A.M. He showers and dresses. Half of Rumpelstiltskin awakens from a dream in which his body is a filament of straw, coiled and twined about itself so as to mimic the presence of flesh and entrails, of hand and ribs and muscles and a knotty, throbbing heart.”

“In his dream, Half of Rumpelstiltskin is seated at a spinning wheel, his foot pumping furiously at the treadle, his body winding into gold…Half of Rumpelstiltskin is the whole of the picture and nowhere in it. He is beautiful and remunerative, and he isn’t even there to see it. Half of Rumpelstiltskin has spun himself empty.”

The language throughout this collection is as spectacular as the subject matter, and Brockmeir continues in this tone, adding his innovative style to make this new story even better.

By 1:25 P.M. Rumpelstiltskin is receiving a Mad Lib from his other half: “Sorry, I just need to vent some of my _______(bodily organ)_____________and frustration,  I should learn to control my temper. If there’s a moral to this whole affair, that must be it—but you know how it goes. _____________(tame interjection), at least we’re not as bad as _________(fictional character renowned from losing his temper to no good end).” By 10:35 P.M. our hero “falls asleep watching The Dating Game,” and once again, the connection between reader and character is maintained. Who can boast of never having had a day of half-hearted living, a day as fragmented as Half of Rumpelstiltskin felt upon waking?

Regardless of its format or outcome, each story anthologized here shares the common thread of having made it into a cultural understanding of what is “story.” That is to say that these tales have endured because in telling them the story teller transmits knowledge and a sense of culture; the reporting of these events, true or false, is the reporting of a people’s history. Stories mattered when they were oral traditions and they still hold a great deal of cultural importance today.

And yet, for all the waving of wands and magical trumpets and singing animals, Bernheimer’s amalgamation disappoints in one aspect.

It was not until I read Joyce Carol Oates’ rendition of “Sleeping Beauty” (“Blue-Bearded Lover”) that I recognized the absence that had troubled me. Bluebeard’s wife, the beauty in Oates’s story, repeatedly calms her bloodthirsty husband—I had heard this problem before. Although she does it by obeying him, not telling him stories, eventually I realized I was thinking of Scheherazade’s Arabian nights, and missing those stories.

Bernheimer’s collection is incomplete in its absence of tales from the Middle East, Africa and Australia. All collections must leave some beasts and beauties behind, yet one of the Eurocentric tales might have been supplanted with an anecdote from these countries. South American tales, too, are missing. This absence is a shame, for it is in the one story from Mexico that the power of the whole book shines.

“Coyote Takes Us Home,” is crafted from the many “Tales from Jalisco” author Michael Mejia heard before writing this story. As in other cultures, Coyote here is a trickster, a shape shifter; a demon. He is also represents the “coyotes” or polleros who smuggle paying clients across the US/Mexico border.   In Mejia’s story a nameless child tells the tale of crossing with his twin brothers—“It’s like Coyote is trying to trap us with his stories…we watch his words tumble out the open windows, turn to vultures on the road picking over something’s small carcass”—and nothing is as it seems.

“Coyote” is one of the longer stories in this collection, and as Coyote crams more and more people into the small Nova traveling north to America, the characters encounter women left behind by white lovers; the memories of immigrants trapped and dying in train cars; the symbolism of a religion that can no longer direct them how to live. “Later, touching the while feet of the plaster Virgin, we had a vision of the small wet opening between her legs. There was blood and hair and something else. A kind of worm. Who was going to tell us?”

I imagine the covert crossing of borders to be as shadowy and disorienting as this story is. The intangibles we sense in the shadows, the fears we feel in our inability to understand our surroundings—these things are present as much in “Coyote Takes Us Home” as in any of the other stories.  It is for this darkness, that these pieces become authentic renderings of history. We tell stories to learn, and to remember; as Bernheimer said, we share the beauty and the suffering. Although My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me is listed as fiction, it is a true collection of humanity throughout the ages.