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Mar 13, 2010

Ellen rated it:

Hey there Little Red Riding Hood,
You sure are looking good.
You’re everything a big bad wolf could want.
Listen to me…
I don’t think little big girls should
Go walking in these spooky old woods alone.
—Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, 1962

In The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter’s uses a decidedly feminist slant to re-tell familiar myths and stories. “The Company of Wolves,” for example, provides a point-by-point rebuttal of the myths embedded in the More...

8 comments like (23 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

O'Donovan rated it:

The Dog and I learned a valuable lesson last night:

If you're going to read Angela Carter before bed, then don't even bother going to bed at all. For one thing, you won't be able to put the book down. And even if you do, you won't be able to sleep.

This is a beautiful but (as the title suggests) deeply violent and sensual collection of fairy tales, retold in ways that make you wish that they were the first version you'd ever heard. (Although, were we to institute "read More...

0 comments like (11 people liked it)

Jul 01, 2009

Kelly rated it:

"The Marquis stood transfixed, utterly dazed, at a loss. It must have been as if he had been watching his beloved Tristan for the twelfth, thirteenth time and Tristan stirred, then leapt from his bier in the last act, announce in a januty aria interposed from Verdi that bygones were bygones, crying over spilt milk did nobody any good and, as for himself, he proposed to live happily ever after. The puppet master, open mouthed, wide eyed, impotent at the last, saw his dolls break free of thei More...

7 comments like (17 people liked it)

Jul 23, 2008

Martine rated it:

Wow. That was my response after reading just a few pages of The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter's amazing collection of re-imagined fairy tales. Carter has a way with words that pulls you right into her stories, seducing you, intoxicating you. And the stories themselves are pretty impressive, too. Carter has a superb imagination and ambition to match, leading her not just to modernising famous fairy tales, but to feminising them, eroticising them and giving them a dark and primordial slant. The re More...

12 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jun 11, 2009

Jen rated it:

This is why I love reading many books at the same time. I have just finished "The Erkling" from Ms. Carter. She mentions that the creature "makes salads of the dandelions that he calls rude names, 'bum pipes' or 'piss the beds,' and flavors them with a few leaves of the wild strawberry, but he will not touch the brambles; he says the Devil spits on them at Michaelmas."

I would have totally missed this, but thanks to reading Pinker's language book in tandem, I und More...

4 comments like (9 people liked it)

Dec 06, 2008

Elizabeth rated it:

Angela Carter staggers me. I wish I could write fairy tales like this. I wish I could write like this. She makes me feel inept for being able to only express thoughts on paper (or on a server) with some competence and not be able to make them dance, sing, weave mists of smoke around a shrinking figure until she is wrapped in a cloak of palest white and obscured from sight. Seriously. She makes me want to quit my job, sit in front of the computer from now until they cut the electric, and try to More...

4 comments like (11 people liked it)

Dec 23, 2011

Bill rated it:

Angela Carter reveals the dark heart of the fairy story in these memorably quirky versions. She is able to intensify the mythic core of each of these tales, not by stripping them down to their essentials (the obvious way) but by using eccentric, illuminative detail expressed in individualistic prose. Although these versions could be described as feminist and anti-patriarchal, such labels are too limiting for the fierce independence of Carter's intelligence. She is a writer who never shri More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Dec 02, 2008

Jukka added it

Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter
I came across this exploring for the Grimm's Fairy Tale read for my book club. These stories are all influenced from fairy tales, all beautifully crafted, stuff that can sweep you away -- gothic and haunting. The stories often take surprising and inspired turns. Here's a snippet for instance, only a taste to show flavor but chosen to not give anything away:

Outside her kitchen window, the hedgerow glistened as if the snow possessed a light of its ow More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Nov 29, 2007

Cate rated it:

Angela Carter! How have I missed her all these years? My only guess is it's because she's English, and American lit and British lit still doesn't pass seamlessly over the channel. But Angela Carter! What a writer! The style is elegant and OLD, although she's very recent--I felt like I was reading a modern, female Charles Dickens! In my opinion, the best stories in the collection are the title story, a retelling of the Bluebeard tale, and "The Tiger's Bride," a re-visioning of Bea More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Oct 23, 2007

lynne rated it:

Thanks to my class exploring Fairy Tales (a woefully inadequate and unfulfilling class, I have to add, so much to cover so little time!), I was introduced to this author, who has a writing style similar to mine, it's such an inspiration to see examples of what I might produce, if I put my mind to it.

The Bloody Chamber is a collection of fairy tales, retold a la Angela Carter. Many are excellent, one or two just "eh", but overall a great read. She seems to reinterpret the More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 06, 2007

Nathanial rated it:

{continued from Fireworks}

In Fireworks, we have, at turns, the barbaric village, the haunted mannequin, the lost seashore, the crepuscular forest, the invisible city, the ravaged wilderness, the stolen ocean, and the bustling cemetery. I'm tempted to say, again, that her work considers place initially and person secondarily, almost like Mieville's cityscapes, and yet it's not as simple as that: her rhythmic patterns - of indication and indiscretion, inhibition and incredulity - cann More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 11, 2008

Evan rated it:

She re-writes fairy tales to have an ultra-feminismist perspective to them. Needless to say I didn't pull this one off my bookshelf or buy at the good ole Barnes and Nob. Requried reading for my short story class. It definitely was a different and unusual experience, but overall one that I was glad that I had. Modern feministic short story writing at its finest!

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 14, 2007

Jeannine rated it:

This is Angela Carter's important work in which re-writes fairy tales with feminist twists. The title story, especially, is a fascinating reclamation of the story of Bluebeard. I tried not to read this book for a long time, but finally gave in after several strong recommendations from friends and colleagues. I thought it was interesting, and important, but sometimes, alas, I thought - wow - I would have done this or that differently, or I just felt a little disappointed, but maybe that's because More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Sep 10, 2011

Sarah rated it:

Angela Carter was always one of the authors I meant to read, but never got around to. So, when "The Bloody Chamber" was set for my university course, it seemed as good a place to start as any.
And I'm so glad I did. In a word, it's beautiful -- the stories recollect and re-imagine their source fairy tales perfectly, and the imagery is haunting -- so evocative is her language that I can still visualise the white rose from her versions of "Beauty and the Beast".
Mor More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 24, 2011

Amber rated it:

There are few books that make me very vocal about words, but every time I read The Bloody Chamber, I am seized with an appreciation for the figurative language. This book consists in its entirety of incredibly rich and beautiful language, the likes of which every potential writer can only dream of achieving. If there’s anything to envy Angela Carter for, it is definitely her ability to wax poetic with words. Whether she is describing a vampire’s hands in detail or a chamber teeming with blood an More...

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Mar 18, 2011

Kate rated it:

I think the key word in the blurb on the back is "sensual". These stories are a complete reversal of Perault's fashioning of courtly entertainment or Christian Andersen's moralizing and often meek adaptations. People who like the Victorian versions, or even just the Disney ones, will be quite scandalized. I did really enjoy the tales though, reading them on dark rainy nights while I was in Ukraine, and never able to quit a short story in the middle. Her writing is vivid and macabre, la More...

0 comments like

Feb 11, 2011

Caroline rated it:

Thank you, CTY for having such good taste. Just remembered this book after this LRB review of an Angela Carter memoir ---

It was when she was in Tokyo that Carter first picked up Sade’s work by chance and ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’ owes much to his Juliette. [...]
Pornography and fairytale are both anonymous forms, and it is tempting to confuse the anonymous with the natural or archetypal. The Sadeian Woman, a book about pornography, was not popular with feminists (and no one el More...

0 comments like

Jan 30, 2011

Catherine rated it:

Angela Carter's rewritings of fairy tales are, for me (and apparently for Salman Rushdie, who wrote the preface to the omnibus edition of Carter's short stories that I have), her standout work -- I admire much of what she's written, but these are indelible. The descriptions and the sense of growing dread in "The Bloody Chamber", the Bluebeard story, are worth the price of admission alone, as is the ending. Other standouts are the Beauty & The Beast stories ("The Courtship of Mr. More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 30, 2011

Ina rated it:

(Just google the summary)

After spending much of the last quarter in Brandon Sanderson's highly epic, fantastical and fast-paced universe, going back to my unfinished reading of Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, felt a little bit like wading through water after a sprint. I had to re-acquaint myself with her story telling. That is, where Sanderson had a couple of thousand pages at his disposal for his narrative, for each story, Carter only had ten. So it was very much like a condo un More...

1 comment like

Jan 24, 2011

Althea rated it:

I debated giving this five stars. I love retellings of traditional tales, and these are indeed excellent.
However, having recently re-read Tanith Lee's similar collection (Red As Blood), I realize that I personally somewhat prefer Lee's take.

Carter has apparently stated that her intention here was not so much to "re-tell" the story, but to "to extract the latent content from the traditional stories." Probably because of that, there are a great number of rathe More...

0 comments like

Jan 17, 2011

Nathan rated it:

This is a collection of short stories, each based on a myth or legend. We have Little Red Riding Hood, we have Beauty and the Beast, we have Puss in Boots. I couldn't place the mythic origin of the first story which shares the title of the collection, but it was my favourite. The stories are sexy, as though the pages are musky and every action throbs with suppressed erotic anticipation. Girls cusping sexual experience are in each story, often coerced by circumstance into sex. The eroticism More...

0 comments like

Jan 05, 2011

Pikachu rated it:

My favorite short story in this anthology was probably "The Bloody Chamber," a modernization of Bluebeard. If you aren't familiar with this fairytale then I won't spoil it for you, but if you are, then you'll be pleased to know that Angela Carter stays true to the timeless, sinister foreshadowing of the original, even while bringing it up to date. Her descriptions have a poetic ethereal quality that flows like water, and her characterization is quite good. Fairytale characters tend to More...

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Nov 10, 2010

Marie rated it:

In The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter re-works, re-imagines and re-tells familiar fairy tales and legends with a dark, grisly twist. Carter takes the fairy tale model and tears it apart; consciously avoiding the traditional “Once upon a time” and “happily ever after” framing device. Her female characters are bawdy, independent and utterly refreshing, as she uses the fairy tale as a vehicle for articulating feminist ideas and subverting the traditional roles of women. At times, these stories will More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 21, 2010

Ice rated it:

I am not a very patient reader, and Angela Carter is not a very fast-paced writer. Nonetheless I found myself immersed in her stories--in this case strange and disturbing retellings of fairy and folk tales we all thought we knew and understood. It is a challenge for every writer who attempts a retelling to not only portray perhaps a different light, but to weave at the same time an organic tie to the original, which not everyone is able to succeed in (mostly they alter key elements of the origin More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 10, 2010

Christin rated it:

A definitive book for those interested in either feminist literature or re-wrought fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber is so named after the short story in this anthology that retells the story of Bluebeard. Carter's stories deal blatantly with sexuality, feminism and power along with the usual notes of magic and enchantment to be found in fairy tales. Taking the leaps of faith that fairy tales require (a key from which blood cannot be cleaned, werewolves that hunt young women down hidden forest t More...

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May 07, 2010

Mike (the Paladin) rated it:

Another book moved to the top of the list because it's a library book...small little volume.

A strange little book. Most people know that the fairy tales we tell and read our children are milder versions of somewhat more....frightening morality tales that were apparently designed to frighten children into behaving. Don't go into the woods, you'll get killed or die. Don't talk to strangers, they'll kill you. These stories are not "retellings" of the originals, but reworkings More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 04, 2010

Victoria rated it:

I cannot rave about this book enough. A quote on the back of the book describes Carter as a "quirky, original, baroque stylist" and I couldn't agree more. This collection of re-written fairy tales is very lush. Carter makes them into works of great literature, all the while further highlighting their bawdiness, and highly-gendered nature with her word choice. Likewise, her word choice links all the tales together so, like good fairy tales, the only real way to tell where one story ends More...

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Jan 27, 2010

Ceridwen rated it:

Yesterday, I had a birthday party for my Christmas-born daughter. She received an embarrassment of princess accoutrement: crowns, jewels, plastic sparkle shoes, dolls, et&c and whathaveyou. Last week, when I picked her up from my dad's house, she and my step-mom, Chris, were snuggled together on the couch, watching Disney's “Beauty and the Beast”. It was the end of the movie when I came in, right before the transformation, and Chris put up her hand, apologized, and said she couldn't talk until t More...

49 comments like (40 people liked it)

Jan 20, 2010

Harry rated it:

I think it can be difficult to sum up a collection of works that, whilst held together with a central concept, often vary wildly and as such Carter's reworking of classic tales is, for me, a little variable.

Initially the more multi-faceted and sensual tone that Carter brings to the stories adds an extra dimension to tales we are all familiar with but at times it is almost as though she feels a NEED to include the sexual, sometimes at the expense of the pace of the story as it occasion More...

0 comments like

Dec 29, 2009

Supernatural rated it:

Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, published by Penguin (ISBN 014017821x), tells a selection of fairy tales; however, like Emily Dickenson's suggestion for truth, she tells them slant. These are tales in wolves' clothing, wearing originals skinned and not quite as expected. Ms. Carter delivers an Victorian panorama of beastly suitors, ruby necklaces that mock mortality; yet, her women survive seductions, becoming neither frail ghosts nor wanton puppets. Her language retains a stately pace but d More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

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