'My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me'

I didn't think the Kindle would be useful on vacation in Melbourne. There're other things to do besides catching up on my reading! I did some of that in Shanghai already! The Kindle is good company on work trips. So now, the wifi and 3G-enabled iPad (1st Gen) performed admirably as a source of information and light reading of the news.

I brought just one book along. It wasn't a surprise that I didn't manage to flip a page of the book till I got onto the plane. Well, I usually don't watch any movies on the plane. I had already watched the one and only film on the way into Melbourne. So for the return flight, I figured even if I read slowly, I can finish this book in less than 3 hours. I had 4 other hours to kill. So I skipped the eeeky inflight food and napped. Then I woke up to ask for the sticky date ice-cream, cheese and fruits, and settled down with to read.

Edited by Kate Bernheimer, it's a collection of fairy tales written by different authors, organized loosely by country of origin. It's titled 'My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me'. At the end of each tale, I like how the respective authors get to explain why they wrote it and what the chosen tale meant to them.

I like Timothy Schaffert's 'The Mermaid In The Tree' and how it's inspired by his reading of the original Andersen tale - the girl the prince marries instead of the little mermaid. He said "She's innocent in the tale, yet we feel compelled to cast her as the story's villain, due to her beauty and perfection, and the fact that she's marrying the prince and the mermaid is not. I was also moved by Andersen's portrait of the mermaid's undersea luxury among lost treasures and its contrast to her mute servility on land. But the bride in my tale gets the prince only after his love for the mermaid has ruined him, leading to broken hearts for everyone."

Joy Williams' 'Baba Iaga And The Pelican Child' is strangely riveting. She links the artist and ornithologist John James Audubon in the story as he was a "great slaughterer of birds....He killed tirelessly for pleasurable sport and would wipe out entire mangrove islands of its inhabitants because...well, because [I] she guess it was easy once he got started. I do hope the curse of history will catch up with him. Perhaps Baba Iaga will be the great facilitator in that regard. Baba Iaga is the most marvelous creature in all of Russian folklore and totally unpredictable in her behavior. In this story, she becomes kind and sorrowful, even, perhaps, tragic."

Neil Gaiman wrote his 'Orange' in the form of a numbered questionnaire. I enjoyed that. He said, "Sometimes it is best if the sun does not come in. This is a cautionary tale, after all, and I think they even predate How Things Came To Be This Way stories ("Don't go there. That was how your uncle was eaten by a cave lion. Don't eat that. Let me tell you what it did to my guts.") and it would not be a cautionary tale if things began well and ended even better. // But there is a possibility of a happy ending, and we must take them where we can find them. Sun, come you in."

Fairy tales are awesome. Like what Kate Bernheimer said in her Introduction, "For in a fairy tale, you find the most wonderful world. Yes, it is violent; and yes, there is loss. There is murder, incest, famine, and rot - all of these haunt the stories, as they haunt us. The fairy-tale world is a real world. Fairy tales contain a spell that is not false: an invocation to protect those most endangered on earth. The meek shall inherit...went one of the very first stories I heard as a child. I believed it then, and still do."

As a child, I've always loved fairy-tales and looked for violent and sad endings rather than happy endings. As I got older, education opened my eyes to the nuances of the author's prejudices and social themes, and I eagerly scoured the earlier editions for additional content instead of the children's version in my brightly-colored books. After a while, it does explain my dislike of Disney tales. The one Disney portrayal of the Andersen's tale I don't mind is The Little Mermaid. In fact, it's probably the only Disney animated series that I like because of the rather different happy ending which also speaks of inter-species acceptance, and whatever else one chooses to assume.