Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The mistress of feminist irony, July 23, 2004
Angela Carter is the mistress of feminist irony. Her most famous and seminal collection The Bloody Chamber took beloved fairy tales and twisted them, showing us how wrong (and even silly) their accepted patriarchal bases were, and offering us a new spin. "The Company of Wolves" was even made into Neil Jordan's film of the same name, starring Angela Lansbury and Stephen Rea.
Saints and Strangers delves into other texts, mostly American history, and again offers another viewpoint on familiar tales. The opener, "The Fall River Axe Murders," is the most effective and the one that most rewards rereading. Carter takes an infamous figure known to most through a simple children's rhyme ("Lizzie Borden took an axe...") and gives her story an Ann Rule spin. This Lizzie doesn't kill her parents...yet. We are given access, instead, to the days preceding the crime, including possible motivating factors like debilitating heat, Victorian-era attitudes, and menstruation. All this making someone who was originally an object of scorn into a sympathetic, and even understandable, character.
"Our Lady of the Massacre" concerns the story of a Lancashire woman who, instead of starving, inadvertently is introduced to the ways of prostitution and pickpocketing. She goes to the New World as an indentured servant but, when the overseer tries to rape her and she mutilates him in self-defense, she runs away and is found by the Indians, whose ranks she joins. This is much more interesting as a story in itself; a portrait of a piece of American history usually left hidden. The main character is entirely believable and I was sorry to see her story end so quickly.
"Peter and the Wolf" is nothing like the folk tale that was turned into the popular children's musical and Disney film. But that is just another instance where Carter turns our expectation on its head. Then the wolf turns out to be something unexpected as well, and the story is just one surprise after another.
There aren't many pieces in Saints and Strangers and the book itself is just about 125 pages, but each piece stands on its own and is literary enough for deep reading. If you truly appreciate each story's merits, this book will not be a quick read. Along the way, we come across moments in the lives of Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire (told, of course, from the perspective of the women in their lives), and the characters of A Midsummer Night's Dream -- before the curtain rises on the events with which we are familiar. Each time, we are introduced to people we thought we knew, but whom Carter's imagination (and, one would imagine, research) takes in entirely unexpected directions.
Saints and Strangers may not be the best starting point for the work of Angela Carter, but it is no slouch, either. However, if you already know what you're getting into and want to dive in head first, get Burning Your Boats, which contains the entirety of her short fiction for just a little more money. No matter which book you get, women will be emboldened -- and men will be frightened -- by Carter's take on all the things we as a culture have always taken for granted.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Folk Tales Gone Awry!, December 10, 1999
American history does not need to be mundane. Fanatics of the past will drool over this collection of historical tales, told from non-traditional perspectives. Each of these short pieces of fiction retells classic stories in a intoxicatingly funny, yet authentic way. Carter is audacious in her plain yet twisted manner of story-telling. She contorts the stories of Lizzy Borden and Edgar Allen Poe in such a way that the reader will find herself somewhat befuddled. This is not to say that "Saints and Strangers" is not a well crafted collection of short stories. This book is indicative of Carter's mastery of putting a feminist spin on traditional folk tales.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Cabinet of Wonders, September 28, 2010
How can I have missed Angela Carter up to now? Judging by these eight stories, she is a master of the imagination, painting her inventions in highly-colored language that runs the gamut of the verbal palette but is never merely garish. "An old woman sells arum lilies. This morning, she came from the mountains, where wild tulips have put out flowers like blown bubbles of blood, and the wheedling turtle-doves are nesting among the rocks." How wonderful the word "wheedling" in that quotation, or "mutilated" in this one, in which she out-grims Grimm: "They wrapped the dead in a quilt and took it home with them. Now it was late. The howling of the wolves mutilated the approaching silence of the night." She is a fantasy writer who nonetheless maintains contact with at least the distant shores of reality, an admirer of Gothic who never sinks to mere genre.
Many of the stories in this collection strike sparks from the flint of other writers. This comes from an account of the childhood of Edgar Allan Poe: "And, as he continued, fascinated, appalled, to stare in the reflective glass at those features that were his own and yet not his own, the bony casket of his skull began to agitate itself as if he had succumbed to a tremendous attack of the shakes." Here she revisits A Midsummer Night's Dream from the perspective of the Indian Boy whom Oberon claimed from Tytania: "Child of the sun am I, and of the breezes, juicy as mangoes, that mythopoeically caress the Coast of Coromandel far away on the porphyry and lapis lazuli Indian shore where everything is bright and precise as lacquer." And here in the last story, "Black Venus," about Baudelaire's mistress, she speaks almost in the poet's own voice: "Sad; so sad, those smoky-rose, smoky-mauve evenings of late Autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart. The sun departs the sky in winding sheets of gaudy cloud; anguish enters the city, a sense of the bitterest regret, a nostalgia for things we never knew, anguish of the turn of the year, the time of impotent yearning, the inconsolable season." Truly, she is a poet herself.
Whether she is writing about Lizzie Borden's axe murders, the wife of Tamburlaine the Great, or a Lancashire lass escaped from a penal colony in Virginia to live among the Indians, Angela Carter plunges her readers into the unique atmosphere of the story and never lets us go. She loves melodrama, but uses it only as an adjunct; her real sympathies lie with the people who are driven to extremes, sometimes with macabre results, but equally often with miracles. These stories are so perfectly suited to their scale, that I can hardly imagine a full-length Carter novel -- though she has written many, and presumably found the ideal scale for them also.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
