Monday, November 14, 2011

Snow White by Donald Barthelme

I was intrigued by the playfulness of the language in
this book. Certain words are regularly twisted (bath to baff, housewife to horsewife). Of course, the fairy tale itself is a strange amalgamation of Snow White (in the Grimm and Disney versions) and Rapunzel. There are hints (at least to my mind) of the story of Cyrano de Bergerac as well. In this muddle of cultural references there's a lot going on with both gender politics and waste. Definitely one of those books you can't attempt to fully understand in whole: the pieces don't fit together nicely into a neat puzzle.

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