Contemporary Fairy-Tale Magic: Subverting Gender and Genre ed. by Lydia Brugué and Auba Llompart (review)

Abstract

Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2022 123 sensibility into ancient imagery and form (1). They are very short, only two or three pages not including the illustrations, in the clean, spare, elegant language of a poet—I was not surprised to learn that Colasanti writes poetry as well. However, we must include the illustrations, because they are by the author herself, using a technique that resembles woodcut printing. After “The One and Only,” we see a girl’s face reflected in the fragments of a mirror—the mirror that the princess broke so she could have more friends, each one a reflection of herself. In the middle of “Among the Leaves so Green O,” we see the prince and his men out hunting for the doe princess who will eventually elude him when she decides that she would rather be a doe than a queen. In her afterword, translator Adria Frizzi points out that Colasanti trained in visual arts before turning to literature and journalism, and the stories themselves are filled with strong images. Reading them is like walking through a gallery of paintings by Remedios Varo or shuffling a deck of beautiful, enigmatic Tarot cards. Colasanti writes that her interest is in “that timeless thing called the unconscious,” and there is a sense in which her stories resemble dreams (1). However, they are also very much about our waking reality. A True Blue Idea offers two significant pleasures. The first is of course Colasanti’s storytelling. The second is Frizzi’s afterword, in which she discusses Colasanti’s place in Brazilian literature and connects her fairy tales to their political and cultural context. Subtly and subtextually, these tales comment on issues of gender and power. Frizzi points out that A True Blue Idea was originally published “around the time when Brazil was beginning to emerge from an extended period of repression with abertura, the ‘opening’ to democratization initiated by the government of General Figuereido,” whose presidency ended the military regime, and that Colasanti has been committed to women’s issues since she began publishing in the 1960s (55). As Frizzi writes, “the association between fairy tales, fantasy, myth, and discourses of subversion is well known” (55). That link is certainly evident in Colasanti’s lovely, surreal tales. I was astonished to read that it took fifteen years for this translation to find a home. Thanks are due to Wayne State University Press for bringing it to us. Theodora Goss Boston University