The Tale of Tales

"I know, it’s a travesty. It’s partly because his collection is so brilliant: his writing is too charismatic, too convoluted, too referential to be accessible. It’s been translated several times, by Richard Burton in the 19th century, by Norman Penzer in the 1930s. Most recently, it’s been really well translated by Professor Nancy Canepa, who is an American scholar. It’s an incredibly entertaining collection full of really magical stories. There are the famous stories, like an early version of “Rapunzel” and “Cenerentola,” which is the original “Cinderella.” In his version, Cinderella kills her stepmother: she slams the lid of a trunk on her head to snap her neck. Yes, you can see why maybe that version hasn’t become the standard, conventional one—but I think it’s actually the best version of the story I’ve read. Cinderella is much more self-determining than in other versions and that, again, is one of the issues, I think. Basile’s heroines shout, they say what they want. One of my favourite stories is called “The Flea” which is about a stupid king who gets bitten by a flea. He then grows this flea to the size of a sheep, has its hide put on display and says whoever can identify where the hide comes from, can marry his daughter. It ends up that the only person who can identify it is an ogre. The daughter says, ‘I don’t want to marry this guy. He’s repulsive. I’m not marrying him!’ and there’s a big shouting match between her and her dad. It’s a wonderful scene, but not the sort of thing you find in the Brothers Grimm. There’s also a story called “The Old Woman Who Was Skinned” which I saw a theatrical version of and talked to the actors who staged it. It’s about two old women who live in a hovel under a castle and the king makes a lot of noise. The women complain about the noise and the king decides that whoever lives in this hovel must be the flower of refinement. He pays court to them and ends up inviting one of them to his bed-chamber. Then, as soon as he finds out that she is an old lady, he has her thrown out of the window. She’s hanging from a tree in the morning when some fairies come by, and they turn her into a beautiful teenage girl and the king decides that he does want to marry her after all. Then her sister finds out that she’s become this beautiful teenage girl and asks how she did it. She says, ‘I had myself skinned’. So the sister goes to a barber and has herself skinned and dies. So this is not a happy ever after. It’s a grisly, strange, enigmatic story, whose final meaning is difficult to decide on. Again, it explains why this book is not a conventional bestseller—although it did have a lot of success in its time. Some of the stories were retold by an 18th-century playwright in Venice, Carlo Gozzi, who was very big in theatre at the time. They had an impact, but not the same impact that would later come to storytellers like the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault and Hans Christian Andersen. They’re too mad and radical. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter And they are intentionally radical because Basile was writing in Naples when it was under Spanish occupation. He was writing in Neapolitan, fighting against the occupation. So he has figures of authority constantly being lampooned: they’re either stupid, or corrupt, or under some kind of sorcery. He’s always pointing out how difficult it is to live at court, how every hope goes to the wind, and you’re constantly being trampled upon. There’s a sense of the craziness of the world and the difficulty of dealing with people in authority. There’s a great moment where two ogres are in a wood, talking about what’s going on in the world. One of them says, ‘Oh, it’s a disaster. There are lazybones being honoured, assassins protected, counterfeiters defended.’ It’s the realization that the ogres—who are supposed to be the villains—are the only ones who seem to know what’s really happening. It’s this sense of the topsy turvy-ness of the world that Basile captures. That is part of his revolutionary project: he’s trying to show how mad the world is. He dismissed the stories in his letters, saying they were old wives’ tales, but you can see when you read them how much he put in, there’s so much poetry and art and skill in them. One critic said reading them made you feel like you want to vomit. They’re just too much. I think that’s part of what makes them so exciting and entertaining, but it does explain why they haven’t landed as a staple of the libraries and bookshops. He was collecting stories that he heard. For most of them, you can track down an earlier version, but he is an important staging post on the journey to the stories that we know today. For example, there’s a much earlier version of “Cinderella” that was told in 9th century China called “Ye Xian.” She lives in a cave with her family and it’s rooted in Chinese culture: it’s more to do with the ghost of her dead mother than a fairy godmother and the whole idea of the slipper is connected with the foot binding culture that became common during the Tang dynasty. What Basile did with that story was gave her the name Cenerentola, which became Cinderella in English. He solidified certain key elements to do with the stepsisters and stepmother, the ball and the search for the girl with the slipper. The story that we know is told by Charles Perrault, a French writer of the late 17th century, but with Basile we see the story really coming into the form that we recognize."