The Things We Are Not Meant to Know

by

Nicki Leone

Once upon a time there was an old witch who had a beautiful red cow with one white ear and a king’s son wanted to steal the animal to give to a girl he loved.

Once upon a time a girl helped an old woman to take a drink from a well, and from that moment on, whenever she spoke roses and diamonds fell out of her mouth.

Once upon a time there was a witch who turned passers-by into cabbages in her garden, until a clever young man outwitted her and set all the people free.

Once upon a time a girl betrayed her father to marry a stranger and left with him for a foreign land. And when he grew tired of her she killed their children and fed them to him in a pie. 

Once upon a time an old poor couple gave shelter to a beautiful young woman. And mysteriously every morning they would find bolts of beautifully woven cloth to sell, and soon they were no longer poor. But the wife was suspicious of their good fortune, and spied on the young girl at night. And she saw the girl become a beautiful crane, and the crane pulled feathers from its wings to weave the lovely cloth. But the crane-maiden saw the old woman spying and left the couple because her secret was discovered, and the old man and woman were very sad.

There are stories I’ve heard so often in my life—some of them are above—that I no longer remember when I heard them for the first time. It is almost like I was born with them in me. These are fairy tales. Their plots and their characters—the inquisitive old women, the beautiful, secretive young girls, the angry lovers and doting fathers—are familiar and frequently glimpsed in even the most modern and avante-garde novels. They are a storyteller’s paint-box of primary colors.

“All great novels are great fairy tales,” editor Kate Bernheimer quotes Vladimir Nabokov in her introduction to My Mother She Killed Me, My Father, He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales. A compilation of retold, re-invented, and re-imagined fairy tales by contemporary writers, the stories in this collection spring from many sources and many fertile, vivid, and strange imaginations.  Some of the contributors use an old tale as a spring board to create a story that is only vaguely reminiscent of the original. Some retell the story altogether, give mythic characters mortal motivations with all the accompanying modern constraints. Some writers prefer to stay in the fairy tale’s familiar setting, but proceed to invite and modern things into its ancient magical forests. And some writers take the original story and just run with it, far, far, farther than Icarus flying towards the sun. Yet their wings don’t seem to melt.

How does one even read such a book?

Not from beginning to end. The stories are grouped loosely by the country of the original fairy tale from which they draw their inspiration, and the table of contents teasingly provides the first line of each story to serve as the familiar call to “…come, gather around while I tell you a tale”—the traditional sing-song call of the storyteller. But if there is any order beyond this, I wasn’t able to divine it by the haphazard, back-and-forth way I went through the book. I started casually, in the spirit of exploration and invitation that has always been evoked by the words “once upon a time,” looking first for the stories based on the fairy tales I knew best. This turned out to be like following one of those story characters who falls down a hole into a different world, because the first story I picked to read—based on Homer’s Odyssey—was Neil Gaiman’s “Orange.” I didn’t recognize it at all.

Perhaps it was the strange way the story is told, the narrator answering a series of questions (for some kind of police report? Or insurance claim against the tanning cream company?) that the reader can intuit, but never actually hears. Perhaps it was the unexpected transformation of a self-centered teenage girl into a self-centered glowing orange being called Her Imminence. Perhaps it was the appearance of aliens. What did happen, however, is what happens to anyone who reads (or finds themselves in) a fairy tale. In very short order I stopped looking for reasons, for internal consistency, for mythic parallels and narrative structure and all the things I usually look for when I am reading. I stopped asking “but why?”  or “is that supposed to be Odysseus?” and just let myself be borne along the current of the story.

And perhaps this was a good way to start the book, by reading a story that was based on another story that was an interpretation of an ancient myth. Because what Gaiman proves with almost obnoxious dexterity in “Orange” is that there is no predetermined, set “form” for a fairy tale. It does not need to begin “Once upon a time. . .” and it certainly does not need to end “. . .and they lived happily ever after.” A fairy tale is not a fairy tale because there are fairies or princesses in need of rescuing in it. It is a fairy tale because it is telling, or retelling, what Gaiman in his comment at the end of “Orange” calls “. . . a very old, very  simple story.” “It’s a mistake story,” he says, “a little-magic-shop story, a things-we-were-not-meant-to-know story.”

Bernheimer writes that when she was first collecting submissions for the book she approached writers “whose work suggested ‘fairy tales’ to me” and asked them to pick a fairy tale as a starting point, and then to write a new one. She was sometimes asked what a fairy tale was, to which her answer was “You already know. A fairy tale is a story with a fairy-tale feel.” For many readers, a “fairy-tale feel” means certain elements, like witches and captive princesses or magic forests that hide treasurers guarded by talking animals and recovered by the dutiful youngest sons of greedy kings. But Gaiman’s notion—that fairy tales are “things-we-were-not-meant-to-know” stories—served me best as a guide through the book. “It is the mystery that lingers,” he notes, “and not the explanation.”

Many of the contributors seem to have also felt this. Words like “creepy” and “eerie” and “strange” litter their short post-story explanations and comments that occur at the end of every chapter. They are fascinated by intersection of the mundane and the uncanny. “I wrote a story about a family in a wood-paneled house by a blue lake, its green lawn dotted with deer, and something that came into the house out of dark forest,” writes Lydia Millet, about a story that has no overt magic in it at all. Kim Addonizio found herself exploring the nature of “partial knowledge. . .how easily a piece of something could be misinterpreted if you didn’t have the whole.” It is a notion that has wrenching implications in “Ever After,” her story of the Seven Dwarves (in their Disney incarnations) waiting for the appearance of Snow White.

Like most collections of stories by many different writers, both the great strength and the great weakness of My Mother She Killed Me is its variety. Forty stories, from forty storytellers, and there is bound to be one or two that won’t resonate with the reader. For me, this was Francesca Lia Block’s rendition of the story of Cupid and Psyche, where Cupid becomes a commitment-shy ex-actor and Psyche is, well, looking for herself, I think? In any case, Block’s notion of the Greek myth of the mortal woman and her invisible immortal lover seemed to flatten my favorite story into a mere caricature of itself.  But this is more an indication of personal prejudice or preference, rather than a flaw in the story, which is beautifully written and full of compassion and gentle humor. It’s not Block’s problem that I like my fairy tales to have more teeth than tenderness.

Then again, there are certain to be any number discoveries and revelations to balance out or make up for the disappointments. For example, Karen Brennan’s odd vision of “The Snow Queen” in the story of a nearly homeless woman who has a homeless, drug-addicted son, (where she, like me, never can forget the Devil’s shattered mirror, scattering its warped shards into the eyes and hearts of men, that begins Hans Christian Andersen’s original story). And John Updike’s rendition of “Bluebeard,” which manages to turn a story about a homicidal maniac with a closet full of murdered women into a touching story of a man and woman for whom even a good marriage isn’t quite enough to overcome the bits of darkness within themselves. Leave it to Updike, I thought when I finished his contribution with reluctant admiration, to make Bluebeard seem like a sympathetic and even innocent character.

Eventually I stopped reading stories because they were familiar and started to choose them based on other, equally arbitrary criteria: Because I knew the contributor. Because I didn’t know the contributor. Because I had never heard of the fairy tale. Because I’d never heard that version of the tale. Because there was only one story from that country. Because so many authors couldn’t resist trying their hand at “Rumpelstiltskin.” Because so many of the stories were based on The Brothers Grimm.

It is an indication of the strength of My Mother She Killed Me that no matter which lens I looked through, no matter which way I turned it, so to speak, in the light, I found the same sense of strange discovery. On reflection, I think I could have read the book straight through and still felt that sense of fractured pleasure. The first story, Joy Williams’ “Baba Iaga and the Pelican Child,” is easily one of the strongest in the book. As well as one of the most horrific, which is saying something when you consider that fairy tales deal in parricide, filicide, dismemberment and cannibalism as a matter of course. The table of contents is arranged by country, but it could have been arranged by the zodiac signs of the contributors and I still think patterns would have emerged—of mysteries without answers. Of things we aren’t meant to know. The writers in My Mother She Killed Me seem to have all spontaneously agreed that there will always be things that come into the house out of the forest.

Books mentioned in this column:
My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me by Kate Bernheimer (Penguin Books, 2010)

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.