Ms. Maitland's interests are as varied as her characters in this stunning collection of short stories about women's lives. From classical mythology and folk stories to inexplicable accidents of history and tales of the supernatural, these narratives "are infused with a feminist awareness and . . . deserve to be read out loud" ("Ms.")
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
English writer Sara Maitland tried to give a feminist slant to theology in her non-fiction work A Big-Enough God. In this collection of short stories, she does the same for a broad range of cultural narratives--from mythology, fable, and scripture to history, journalism, and fiction. Drawing inspiration from these sources, she has rewritten the stories to bring out the contribution and the position of their female characters, often marginalized in the original. So, for example, in "Siren's Song" the sirens on the reef become the focus, not the sailors they lure to their deaths in revenge for a rape. In the title story, the fairy tale of "Hansel and Gretel" inspires a story with the witch at the center, no longer a villain but a safe abortion provider and fertility expert.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
A woman obsessed with food devours her own plump and tasty baby. A young girl denounces her mother as a witch, then watches her writhe in pain as she burns at the stake. Whether she's dissecting failed relationships, condemning the oppression of women through the ages or recasting classical myths, Maitland (Ancestral Truths) has an undisguised penchant for the dark underside of life. Feminism, mysticism, guilt, confusion and, above all, an abiding love of creepy?even repulsive?details propel the 30 stories in this ambitious but uneven collection. Moody, murky, sometimes oppressive, many of the narratives read like imaginative vocal exercises in which the author explores a character (the wicked old crone of "Hansel and Gretel" fame; a 16th-century conquistador; a magician's abused assistant) by assuming his or her point of view and seeing how far she can take it. The more successful stories offer surprising narrative twists; others remain core samples of particular emotional states. Anything is possible in Maitland's weird world: sirens, dwarves, transvestites, talking seals and princesses make regular appearances amidst recipes for baked apples, tips on how to recognize a true fag hag, even a brief disquisition on the moons of Neptune. The results may range in quality, but Maitland's reach is breathtaking, her prose as liquid and potent as a witch's brew. Rights, other than electronic: A.P. Watt.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Elegant, Mannered, Repetitive,
By
This review is from: Angel Maker: The Short Stories of Sara Maitland (Paperback)
In 1995, ten years into his production of "A.I.," the film he referred to as "Pinocchio," Stanley Kubrick called in British author Sara Maitland as a script doctor. Maitland writes: "By the time I came to the project it had become enormous, unwieldy, unfocused. Kubrick needed some through-line of fairy tale, of story beneath plot. He was creating a new myth and needed someone who was at home with myth and how it works. . . . Kubrick had encountered my short stories and recognised that that is what I do. I write about the underbelly of human emotions in the framework of myth and fairy story." (Sara Maitland, "My Year with Stanley," appearing in The Independent, available on the Internet)
"Angel Maker" (1996) is the collection of Maitland's short stories that Kubrick must have known, the basis of her reputation as a reworker of ancient myths and fairy tales, and to that extent, they are stylish, mannered tales. Maitland has an ear for period dialogue, and she writes convincing interior monologues. Thus, the title story is a sequel to the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale told from the witch's point of view. Mixing German romanticism with post-modern irony, Maitland pictures the witch as a companion-lover to the grown Gretel, a beautiful foolish woman bound to make her own choices in a world where men plainly do not matter. Similarly, "Siren Song" is the first-person chant of the Sirens in the eons before the arrival of Odysseus. "This is what Sirens do. We wait for the coming of strong men and by the deceptive sweetness of our voices we lure them to their doom. We are Sirens, this is what we do." Like the Sirens of Ovid, Maitland's seductive singers were once playmates of Demeter's daughter Persephone, who was abducted to Hades where she rules as Queen six months out of the year. In Maitland's retelling, however, Demeter never reproached them or penalized them by changing them into creatures. Instead, destroying lustful, vicious men is simply their nature, and it is justified by the Dark One's rape of their childhood playmate and by his lust which the Sirens project, without further justification, onto all men (other than the bourgeois homebound Odysseus, of course). As these summaries suggest, there is more - or perhaps less - at work in "Angel Maker" than depictions of human emotions, in all their complexity. This is because Maitland, it must be said, is a writer of women's tales. Either gently ("Conquistador," "Daphne," "Forceps Delivery," "The Wicked Stepmother's Lament") or leadenly ("An Edwardian Tableau," "The Tale of the Beautiful Princess Kalito"), she castigates antedeluvian conceptions of women's roles and choices. Women, in her stories, are often gay and almost always victims of insensitive, dominating men. Sometimes they are co-opted victims. Sometimes they are ironic victims. Sometimes they are poetic or heroic victims. But they are almost invariably victims. Thus, in "The Burning Times," homosexual awakening and the desire for acceptance in an unfriendly world lead to death and madness. In "Lullaby for My Dyke and Her Cat," an author encounters a kind of writer's block attempting to tell, first by narrative and then by anecdote, why she thinks her son is turning into a cat. The cat of her lesbian friend has just died, and the perceived metamorphosis of her child apparently illustrates the transference of her affections to her friend. As with the Lifetime channel on cable television, either you have an insatiable appetite for this type of fiction or you do not. As much as I admire Maitland's craft and feminist preoccupations, and appreciated the exceptions ("The Tale of the Valiant Demoisselle" and "Seal-Self," for example, memorably conflate sex/childbearing and death), I ultimately found most of these tales limiting and repetitious. - Robert E. Olsen
4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Perfection,
This review is from: Angel Maker: The Short Stories of Sara Maitland (Paperback)
This was an amazing colection of short stories by a wonderful author. They are all stories you have heard before but taken from another character's point of view. Puts a wonderful slant on our world. Maitland should get more recognition than she does.
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