The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold is a lavishly poetic novel that draws upon the motifs of traditional German, Russian and Yiddish folklore and fairy stories to recount the visionary obsessions of a passionate young woman. The narrative moves freely through time and space, uniting Ketzia Gold's early childhood with her sexual awakenings, creating a dreamscape of haunting vividness. Marked by a logical illogic and disarmingly sane madness, this haunting and innovative fable creates an emotional landscape that's as impossible to escape as it is for young Ketzia to inhabit. Kate Bernheimer interweaves hypnotic imagery and everyday life, moving back and forth through time, piecing together the fragments of memory and imagination with an obsessive lyricism that recalls the poetic fictions of Carol Maso. Bernheimer's story is a rich tapestry, patterned with childhood longings and the luxuriant complexity of womanhood.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Flitting into a state resembling madness, the protagonist of this unconventional debut snips the story of her life into a strip of patchwork pieces, alternating vignettes with retellings of German, Russian and Yiddish folk tales. Ketzia Gold is the middle of three sisters, the most difficult and prone to flights of fancy ("for a short but rather confusing time when I was younger, my sisters and I turned into flowers"). She sleeps in the dog's bed and hides out at the library, but other people tell her she is clever and pretty, and Adam Brown, the smartest boy in her class at school, wants to marry her. When they grow up, they do marry, and for a while they are happy together, Adam working as a department store pianist and Ketzia as a transcriptionist for the Triple D detective firm. But their happiness is not fated to last: first, Adam's twin sister, Abby, moves in, and Adam seems unnaturally fixated on her. Ketzia leaves abruptly, only returning when Abby finally goes away. Then, in a Bluebeard-like twist, Adam gives Ketzia a set of keys and tells her never to look in a certain hall closet. Of course, Ketzia is unable to resist and finds only a stash of innocent photographs. After a period of stumbling malaise, Ketzia leaves Adam again to wander alone in an unnamed hot Southern state. Narrated in a deadpan, childlike voice, Ketzia's story is a fragmented contemporary fairy tale, shaped only by the fluctuations of its protagonist's coy helplessness. It relies on the inventiveness of its language to charm, and while Bernheimer does manage a balanced mix of the absurd and the matter-of-fact, too many mangled phrases ("Ketzia launched two green eyes about the room") disrupt the effect.
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Review
"The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold [is] a truly original approach to the Bildungsroman, in which Kate Bernheimer has constructed a coherent and compelling narrative by cobbling together the plot lines of a wide variety of fairy tales, and my admiration for her talent as a writer, and the dazzling use to which she puts it, is of the highest order."
—Kathryn Davis
"Kate Bernheimer's The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold is a seductive work of intelligence and charm." —Carole Maso
"Original and beautifully written. . . . Kate Bernheimer is an exceptional writer of fiction." —Fanny Howe
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More About the Author
Kate Bernheimer is the author of a short story collection (Horse, Flower, Bird, Coffee House Press, 2010) and a trio of novels (The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold, 2001; The Complete Tales of Merry Gold, 2006; and The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold, 2011). She has edited three fairy-tale anthologies including the World Fantasy Award winning My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (Penguin Non-Classics, 2010), which she edited (with assistance from Carmen Gimenez Smith). She also writes children's books, including The Girl in The Castle inside The Museum (Random House Children's Books/Schwartz & Wade), which was illustrated by Nicoletta Ceccoli and was named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2008. The Lonely Book, her second children's book, illustrated by Chris Sheban, is forthcoming from Random House Children's Books/Schwartz & Wade on February 14, 2012. A third is currently being illustrated. Kate Bernheimer founded and edits the literary journal Fairy Tale Review. She is Associate Professor & Writer in Residence at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Golden!,
By Kerrie McNay (Heath, MA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold (Paperback)
Masterfully woven, Kate Bernheimer's new book leaves you at the edge, yearning for more! I cannot do her writing justice with this review, but I will try.From start to finish, the feel of this story is more of three stories interwoven like an intricate braid, woven, perhaps, by the deft hands of the triple aspect: young Ketzia, who lives with her parents and sisters, as the Maiden; working Ketzia, who is the responsible Mother; and tired Ketzia, who doesn't know how time is passing her by, as an old-before-her-time Crone. Taking turns, they weave with the golden thread the stories that run through our blood since olden times like a river through many lands. Here, Bernheimer utilizes tales from German, Russian, and Yiddish folklore. This thread does not overpower the story of our narrator, but ties her life together, bringing all three points to a beginning, not an end. Bernheimer's words have been a comfort to me, keeping me from thinking too much about life's woes. It felt like Ketzia was sitting next to me, telling me her stories, a commuter friend. I look forward to future novels! Kerrie Colantonio
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An "escape from a dream of living",
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This review is from: The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold (Paperback)
Ketzia Gold is a really good typist and transcriptionist who once gathered fallen stars from the desert one night to help guide her home, but things didn't go happily ever after just because of that.
If you like (to borrow from an Emma Donoghue title) "old tales in new skins," you may love Kate Bernheimer. If you're looking for another Robin McKinley, Jane Yolen, Donna Jo Napoli, etc., you may be disappointed. I've enjoyed works by those writers too, but Bernheimer's work far surpasses any of them. This is the first in a series of books about the Gold Sisters. The second is about Merry Gold, and a third is forthcoming. The "tales" in this novel move between multiple points of view in different sections, using Russian, Yiddish, and Grimm Brothers folk and fairy tales as sorts of - at times dim, at times, bight, beacons - guiding the reader throughout Ketzia's sad childhood and through her early adulthood and relationship with a troubled shopping mall pianist named Adam. Bernheimer is a true original. Extraordinary.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good Enough,
By Martin P. Eckert "PaulE" (Houston, TX United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold (Paperback)
I wasn't sure what to expect with this book. I'd wanted to buy it for awhile because Bernheimer is the editor of The Fairy Tale Review, and I was expecting the story to be a bit more of the fantasy persuasion. However, the story is much more based in realism than the author may have intended, or than the back cover wanted to let on.
"The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold" is a novel that happens in really short chapters that are best viewed as short stories unto themselves (at least it makes the most sense that way). We follow Ketzia, an aloof young woman who waxes poetic about the everyday happenings of her life. The writing is pretty and poetic and all, but as this type of writing often does, it never really struck a chord with me. Each individual chapter is worth reading twice and appreciating the details that work subliminally to paint a picture of Ketzia and her surroundings. However, after I stopped reading, there was little that I could recall that really affected me. The story jumps around in time a lot, and there's not a whole lot to distinguish whether a scene is happening before or after the ones that came before it. The latter third of the book is the most linear, and perhaps not coincidentally, also the most enjoyable. There were a few noteworthy passages that I really liked, but for the most part, I'll probably forget most of this story in a couple of weeks.
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