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Hansel and Gretel

Name: Hansel and Gretel
Author: Mike Klaassen

THE BROTHERS GRIMM STORY TOLD AS A NOVELLA

by Mike Klaassen ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

An embellishment of an age-old folk tale that adds intriguing elements while remaining faithful to most of the original...

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A novella offers a retelling and expansion of “Hansel and Gretel.”

Following the broad strokes of the original folk tale, Klaassen (Fiction-Writing Modes: Eleven Essential Tools for Bringing Your Story to Life, 2015, etc.) adds descriptions and a few plot changes. Young Hansel and Gretel overhear their mother and woodcutter father discussing their plan to take the children deep into the woods and abandon them to avoid their own imminent starvation. In Klaassen’s version, the children’s mother is not identified as a stepmother, and although their father hesitates to accept the plan, he eventually agrees. Hansel gathers reflective stones and leaves a trail when their parents lead them away, enabling him and Gretel to find their way back. Their parents, while happy when the children return, still can find no solution other than to abandon them in the forest. This time, Hansel leaves a trail of bread crumbs, with predictable results. The hungry children follow a magical white bird, first to a berry-laden bush, then to a gingerbread cottage inhabited by a cannibalistic witch who plans to fatten up Hansel for her next meal. This modern variation has Hansel, rather than Gretel, push the witch into the fireplace, ending the spell she has cast over the forest. Klaassen’s development enhances certain aspects of the story, such as the suggestion that the witch’s spell caused the famine; by killing her, Hansel ends the enchantment. But his reworking of the common fairy-tale device of the evil stepmother—making the children’s biological parents complicit in plotting their deaths—is more disturbing than the traditional version. More unsettling still is the children’s determination to return to their parents, perhaps to provide another opportunity for attempted murder. While Klaassen’s addition of descriptions, sensory details, and dialogue brings depth to his novella, there is a certain beauty to the spareness of the original version. Nonetheless, by eliminating the obvious villain, the author allows for more contemplation and discussion concerning both the parents’ difficult decision and their children’s innocent forgiveness.

An embellishment of an age-old folk tale that adds intriguing elements while remaining faithful to most of the original story.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher

Review Posted Online: May 25, 2016

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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by Mark Z. Danielewski

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by Mark Z. Danielewski

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by Mark Z. Danielewski

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.