The Books Briefing: Erica Berry, Yiyun Li

The wolf’s yellow eyes, sharp claws, and snapping tooth hang-out our fairy tales and idioms, Erica Berry writes in her current e book, Wolfish. She asks why the animal has continued as such a potent image of worry, arguing that this will colour the way in which we see the world we share with animals and each other. By deconstructing tales resembling “The Three Little Pigs” and “Little Red Riding Hood,” Lily Meyer wrote this week, Berry asks what risks these canine villains are standing in for.

Berry is much from the one author to research the importance of well-known fables. In Beauty and the Beast, Maria Tatar collects fairy tales revolving round a millennia-old trope (a human marrying an animal) and exhibits how they’re “an expression of anxiety about marriage and relationships—about the animalistic nature of sex, and the fundamental strangeness of men and women to each other,” Sophie Gilbert explains. These accounts point out what preoccupied our ancestors and what morals they hoped to impart. The impulse to speak values by means of storytelling has remained sturdy throughout time: A century in the past, British socialists tried to disseminate their ideology by remodeling people tales, a technique we would acknowledge in modern titles like Chelsea Clinton’s youngsters’s e book She Persisted, J. C. Pan writes.

Fables usually crop up in surprising locations. Sarah Chihaya writes that Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose “is ostensibly a realist historical novel about the lives of women and girls in mid-century France … [but] secretly dwells in the realm of fairy tale.” Li exhibits us why we’re so drawn to those sorts of tales. As Chihaya argues: “We are all, whether we realize it or not, constantly engaged in the process of mythmaking in an attempt to understand the inexplicable.” But this easy logic isn’t all the time sound. Adoption, for instance, is usually portrayed as a magical ending whereby a household is lastly full. But in Somewhere Sisters, Erika Hayasaki dispels this concept. Placement with a special household steadily creates emotions of ache and dislocation; insisting that adoption should imply residing fortunately ever after can compound that damage. Unwinding the narratives of our tradition isn’t a whimsical pursuit: It makes house for brand spanking new meanings and new methods to dwell.

What We’re Reading

Amanda Shaffer

The e book that teaches us to dwell with our fears

“Berry writes evocatively about these real wolves, yet she seems consistently drawn away from the wolves themselves and toward humans’ responses to them. Her writing is richest when she fully commits to examining wolf metaphors and the ways in which we turn even very real wolves into symbols.”

Warwick Goble

The darkish morality of fairy-tale animal brides

“As Maria Tatar points out in the superb introduction to her new collection Beauty and the Beast: Classic Tales About Animal Brides and Grooms From Around the World, the story of Beauty and the Beast was meant for girls who would likely have their marriages arranged. Beauty is traded by her impoverished father for safety and material wealth, and sent to live with a terrifying stranger. De Beaumont’s story emphasizes the nobility in Beauty’s act of self-sacrifice, while bracing readers, Tatar explains, ‘for an alliance that required effacing their own desires and submitting to the will of a monster.’”

Princeton University Press

Fairy tales for younger socialists

“But if attempts to steer children toward politics through literature feel somewhat of-the-moment, they aren’t new: More than 100 years ago, British socialists undertook a similar, if decidedly more militant, project. A new book, Workers’ Tales: Socialist Fairy Tales, Fables, and Allegories From Great Britain, exhumes several dozen fables and stories that first appeared in late-19th- and early-20th-century socialist magazines.”

Getty; The Atlantic

A novel with a secret at its middle

“Li depicts Fabienne as almost superhuman in both marvelous and terrible ways. As a character, she gives Li a chance to explore the strange power of the myths we form about the people who shape us. Yet what really lies in Agnès’s own heart, and the novel’s, is only dimly revealed and much harder to bring to light. To do so is the real work—and pleasure—of reading this subtle and evasive book.”

Getty / The Atlantic

Adoption isn’t a fairy-tale ending

“Fairy tales about adoption don’t circulate just among the public; they can be internalized by adoptees … In her interviews with adoptees, [the sociologist Indigo] Willing noticed that when holes in their narrative about why they were orphaned could not be supplemented with facts, the adoptees turned to fantasy-like tales and speculation passed on from parents. Those she interviewed for her master’s thesis repeated “rags to riches” tropes.”