Little Black Book of Stories (review)

Abstract

Little Black Book of Stories. By A. S. Byatt. New York: Vintage International, 2005.240pp. Once upon a time 1 met a man who told me that he had seen a person turn into stone. He had been six years old, sitting alone on front porch of his grandparents' house in Norway when he had witnessed transformation on road in front of him. Only later did I find that Scandinavian folk narratives are replete with becoming stones and with huldufolk or huldrefolk ones) inhabiting boulders strewn across rocky landscapes. A Stone Woman, literally central story in A. S. Byatt's collection of five stories, elaborates this folk motif into gothic tracery. Ines, a woman grieving over recent death of her mother, finds herself slowly turning into stone: One day she found a cluster of greenish-white crystals sprouting in her armpit. . . . Jagged flakes of silica and nodes of basalt pushed her breasts upward and flourished under fall of flesh, making her clothes crackle and rustle (119). Befriended by a young Icelandic stonemason named Thorsteinn, who tells her tales of laughing weightless elves, hidden heavy-footed, heavy-handed (138), Ines asks him if Katla, troll-woman of an Icelandic saga, was a stone woman too. He responds that, although there were trolls in Iceland who turned to stone, like Norse trolls, if sun hit not all did so. 'Personally,' said Thorsteinn, 'I do not think you are a troll. I think you are a metamorphosis' (143-44). His last words encapsulate Ines's transformation and its unexpected effects (hidden like huldrefolk so readers will be surprised) but also symbolize defining principle of Little Black Book of Stories as a whole. This metamorphic principle, developed on several intertwining levels, is what makes blurb on book's cover so true: Like Hans Christian Andersen and Brothers Grimm, Isak Dinesen and Angela Carter, A. S. Byatt knows that fairy tales are for grown-ups. And in this ravishing collection she breathes new life into form. Magical transformation is hallmark of folk- and fairy-tale structure and content, and Byatt transforms transformations, spinning them out in some stories overtly connected to fairy tale and in others much more covertly with just a hint or a trace of tradition threaded through narrative. A Stone Woman, example of most explicit use of traditional tales in collection, not only refers to Scandinavian story telling about but also transforms obvious troll-to-stone frame in what Frank de Caro and Rosan Jordan might call its exoskeleton in their Re-Situating Folklore: Folk Contexts and Twentieth-Century Literature and Art (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004). Only one other story-the lead story, A Thing in Forest-makes an explicit reference to a classic fairy tale, specifically to and in a brief analogy embedded in a tale ostensibly about two women's different choices in life, in what de Caro and Jordan would call its endoskeleton. In story's opening sequence, Penny and Primrose, two little girls being evacuated with other children from London to a country estate during World War II, notice that train taking them from city passes rural stations whose names were carefully blacked out: The children did not know that namelessness was meant to baffle or delude an invading army. They felt-they did not think it out, but somewhere inside of them idea sprouted-that erasure was because of them, because they were not meant to know where they were going or, like Hansel and Gretel, to find way back (6, emphasis added). Once arrived at their destination, two girls cross great house's terrace, lawns, and then enter estate woods. In forest, liminal space in many fairy tales, and Gretel prototype, two girls encounter the thing, not conventional witch in gingerbread house, but A crunching, a crackling, a crushing more akin to American Indian windigo whose acts remain unspeakable (once again so readers will be surprised) (13-14). …