Does the readers of kindermurchen in English need one more translation of this tale? Jack Zipes alone has provided several excellent ones one just recently that’s true to horror of the original Brothers Grimm tale, and Maria Tatar has well including one in her Grimm’s Grimmest collection. So what do these two gentlemen, neither a well-regarded folklorist like Tatar and Zipes are, hope to add to our reading pleasure?
Quite a bit actually. Their elegant book, which comes in two sizes of reasonably sized and really oversized with no other difference that I can see, packs a lot into fifty- four pages. Now I really do recommend you start off by reading the afterword whose author is not stated alas) as it gives a good look at now two century written history of this tale and briefly gives you Gaiman’s reasons for this re telling and how Mattotti came to be the artist for it. No, it won’t spoil their telling at all.
It starts off in an archetypal storytelling fashion by framing the story to come: ‘This all happened a long time ago, in your grandmother’s time, or in her grandmother’s time. A long time ago.back then, we all lived on the edge of the great forest.’ Gaiman goes on to set it during a time past when war was all the peasants knew of the greater world and how it effected them — soldiers eating their crops, men conscripted for the war, and hunger, always hunger, as a constant companion.
And that’s all I’ll see of the story. It works well, but really isn’t that different from myriad other tellings — The Witch fails in her evil, the children live, and everything’s more or less well at end.
Now what makes this book and the telling worth getting (or giving this Winter season of gift giving) is Lorenzo Mattotti’s black and white woodblock illustrations that give a dark edge to Gaiman’s text, be it of the forest itself or of the witch. They in essence form the second framing device for the story by setting the mood.
Hiighly recommended I’d say, as it’s something Gaiman fans will buy. It’s a fast read, no surprise there, and it would also make a nice gift that season for anyone interested in the Brothers Grimm.
(TOON, Graphics, 2014)
