Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman ~Haruki Murakami

–published 2006
–362 page, Vintage Books
–4/5 stars

I worked with a guy back in my Tulsa days who could tell a story about how he painted a barn and you would be enraptured by his every word. He wasn’t particularly charismatic, he was just a simple man. Ollie could tell a good story.

Haruki Murakami shares that quality with Ollie, perhaps more so than any author I have ever read. Why? Because his stories do not have to necessarily be about anything other than the average day to day existence and can still have you hanging on every word. It is an amazing and hard to describe phenomenon. As he did with After the Quake and After Dark, Murakami had me reading story after story in rapid succession, each story compelling me to read ‘just one more’ before I went about whatever tasks I had set before me that day.

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The Bloody Chamber ~Angela Carter

–published 1979
–164 pages, Harper and Row
–4/5 stars

Despite what reviewer Helen Simpson, of the Guardian, and the author herself seems to assert, at the core the 10 stories compiled in this collection are indeed retellings of traditional fairy tales, or at the very least re-workings. These tales are indeed ‘adult’ versions, in most cases, of familiar and known fairy stories, but they are not ‘adult’ in the sense that they are some form of erotic literature. They are ‘adult’ because they are by turns dark and treacherous and, as Angela Carter mentions, tales that “extract the latent content from the traditional stories”. If you have taken the opportunity to read the beloved fairy tales in a more original format, as opposed to the Disney-fied versions, you of course know that these tales are indeed full of latent sexuality and violence. What Angela Carter has done is to take these fairy tales and make something that feels both familiar and new at the same time. By doing so she has succeeded in crafting 10 tales that could not be more perfect for the kind of reading that sends a chill up your spine.

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