{"id":209011,"date":"2025-10-13T04:39:24","date_gmt":"2025-10-13T04:39:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/209011\/"},"modified":"2025-10-13T04:39:24","modified_gmt":"2025-10-13T04:39:24","slug":"kate-dicamillo-on-the-solace-of-fairy-tales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/209011\/","title":{"rendered":"Kate DiCamillo on the Solace of Fairy Tales"},"content":{"rendered":"

When the children\u2019s author Kate DiCamillo<\/a> was a girl, she would listen over and over to a record of the Brothers Grimm story \u201cThe Juniper Tree\u201d\u2014in which, among other terrors, a child is decapitated. \u201cI was not a kid who liked to be frightened,\u201d DiCamillo said recently. But, she added, stories like the Grimms\u2019 taught her \u201chow to be brave in the face of that terror\u2014which is a terror we all feel, not just kids. To wit, here I am, at sixty-one, going back to these stories and finding more comfort, more terror, and ever more relevance.\u201d DiCamillo, who has two books out this fall\u2014\u201cLost Evangeline<\/a>,\u201d along with a twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of her best-selling \u201cBecause of Winn-Dixie<\/a>\u201d\u2014joined us not long ago to recommend some of her favorite books of and about fairy tales. Her commentary\u2014a mix of written remarks and conversation\u2014has been edited and condensed.<\/p>\n

The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm<\/p>\n

by the Brothers Grimm, translated from the German by Lore Segal and Randall Jarrell<\/p>\n

These funny, terrifying stories (and the funny, terrifying illustrations, by Maurice Sendak, that accompany them in this edition) are a direct route to the collective subconscious. Each one is utterly familiar and utterly strange.<\/p>\n

Something wonderful about the Grimms<\/a> is how their stories are a kind of door between the fantastical and the facts of what it means to be human in the world. They\u2019re a hinge between the historical truth and, on the other side, the truth of the human condition\u2014of the way things are, and have been, and will forever be.<\/p>\n

Fairy Tales<\/p>\n

by Hans Christian Andersen, translated from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally<\/p>\n

I grew up with Hans Christian Andersen. I can\u2019t even articulate the impact that his sensibility has had on my sensibility. In his work, everything is animate, everything has a soul, everything has a story. Boy, that got me at a very young age. His work convinced me that all things (matchsticks and tin soldiers, flowers and fir trees) are sentient, that every being has a heart, and that every heart can be broken.<\/p>\n

Like the Grimm stories, there\u2019s a way that Andersen\u2019s seem to belong to the collective imagination\u2014they\u2019ve been told and retold. But one thing that makes his quite different is that they\u2019re much more about the individual. In Grimm, the adults are just tossing children out into the world, and the world is a terrible place. But in Andersen\u2019s stories there\u2019s much more about the individual\u2019s journey. Like in \u201cThe Ugly Duckling,\u201d where you feel so profoundly the sorrow of the main character\u2019s never fitting in.<\/p>\n

Winter\u2019s Tales<\/p>\n

by Isak Dinesen<\/p>\n

I came to Dinesen through the film \u201cOut of Africa.\u201d Then I read the biography<\/a> of her by Judith Thurman, whom I love. Dinesen\u2019s first collection of stories is \u201cSeven Gothic Tales<\/a>.\u201d Thurman quotes a passage from one of those stories, \u201cThe Old Chevalier,\u201d that I think might help reveal why she wrote it:<\/p>\n

Reality had met me such a short time ago, in such an ugly shape, that I had no wish to come into contact with it again. Somewhere in me a dark fear was still crouching, and I took refuge within the fantastic like a distressed child in his book of fairy tales. I did not want to look ahead, and not at all to look back.<\/p>\n

My favorite story in \u201cWinter\u2019s Tales\u201d is the harrowing \u201cSorrow-Acre,\u201d which is a retelling of a folk story. It\u2019s about a mother who threshes an entire field by herself\u2014that is, who does the impossible\u2014to save her son\u2019s life. It undoes me every time\u2014and it also makes me feel like you can perform the heroic even when you don\u2019t think you can. Dinesen didn\u2019t start writing until she was much older. She drew on a lifetime of experience, and that gives these fairy tales the authority to say, I\u2019ve made it through. You can make it through.<\/p>\n

The Mythmakers<\/p>\n

by John Hendrix<\/p>\n

This is a graphic novel about the friendship between C.\u00a0S. Lewis and J.\u00a0R.\u00a0R. Tolkien, who became acquainted when they were faculty members at Oxford and went on to form a writing group, Inklings, where members would read their work aloud to one another. I was never a big Tolkien reader, but I did love \u201cThe Chronicles of Narnia<\/a>\u201d as a kid\u2014they were so magical to me that I never dared to go back to them as an adult, for fear that the magic wouldn\u2019t be there.<\/p>\n

I found this book fascinating and moving. So much of it is about how Lewis and Tolkien\u2019s friendship gave birth to their works, and how those works reflect their times. Both men were in the trenches in World War One, and Hendrix really shows how their need to make stories was shaped by the upheaval and great horror they lived through. Graphic novels aren\u2019t my favorite way to read, because I\u2019m so drawn to the written word, but it\u2019s very powerful having the wasteland of the trenches drawn out for you. You see it, you feel it, and then you feel the stories arising out of that. It\u2019s, like, how do I make sense out of this? How do I comfort myself, with all this loneliness and terror? You tell a story that then can comfort somebody else in their loneliness and their terror.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When the children\u2019s author Kate DiCamillo was a girl, she would listen over and over to a record…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1206,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[353,49,48,1783,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-209011","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-disable-inline-signup-unit","12":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209011\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}