| |||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store for more details. |
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
Book Description
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fairy tales with a modern(and adult) twist,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Bloody Chamber And Other Stories (Paperback)
This book is an absolute gem with not a single story feeling out of place or unneccessary. Every story works on its own but the overall collection is fabulous. This is a book for anyone who enjoyed traditional fairy tales as it expands on each of the traditional stories like Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast and Puss in Boots whilst the adult content ensures that it doesn't feel as if you are re-reading childhood books. This has become one of my favourite books and I would recommend it to anyone whose inner child desires a slightly more intense fairy tale.
46 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sense and Sensuality,
By
This review is from: The Bloody Chamber And Other Stories (Paperback)
I first came about this collection of stories through the inclusion of two of its works in the Neil Jordan film, the Company of Wolves. From this, I was immediately impressed and intrigued by Carter’s style of writing. In ‘the Company of Wolves’, we saw the ingenious juxtaposition between the varying mythologies of the fairy story, with the natural-sexual awakening of the adolescent. This is the defining factor of these works. Though the stories move from place to place to explore further myths and legends, it is this one consistent thread that anchors the stories together to create a unified work. The writer creates reoccurring motifs of love, lust and sexuality that give the stories a further narrative cohesion, despite being generally fragmented in terms of characters and scope.The unity of the book, and the sustaining of the literary atmosphere, is also created through the varied textual forms that Carter chooses to chronicle. So, for her examinations here the writer hand-picks legends that have the strongest roots in sensuality... so we have vampirism, werewolves, feral children, and jungle beasts beguiling and defiling a succession of young women in a series of deeply emotional narrative episodes. To go into any great detail about these stories would be a great injustice to readers who are yet to experience Carter’s poetic use of language and deft storytelling capabilities. Needless to say, the stories featured drip with a dense, erotic atmosphere that is occasionally overwhelming... though there is also a strong underlining of horror, tension and mystery; with the reader free to read between the lines and decode the various clues that Carter layers within her work. The author’s real genius though, is her ability to depict the more mundane aspects of life, and enrich them beyond the realms of everyday literature into a kind of Technicolor majesty through the use of poetic prose, self-referentialism, biblical quotations and more than a hint of metaphorical imagery. She also writes her stories in a beautiful stream of conscious style that is filled with richly constructed details, which brings to life every action in a completely vivid way to further develop the evocative world that is created especially for us. It’s an audacious device, but one that works exceptionally well with this kind of material... so because of this, the continual atmosphere of gothic gloom also helps to lull the reader into an almost hypnotic state in which Carter’s words can re-develop, in order to take on newer, more subjective meanings. This book takes us on a beautiful, shocking and often frightening journey into realms of innocence and sensuality that few literary works can equate. Carter’s talent as a storyteller and as a poet are greatly under-appreciated by the so-called people in the know (how else can you explain her lack of inclusion in the Big Read’s Top 100?), and, when viewed in the context of this book, becomes something of a sad reminder of what a great talent we’ve lost. Thankfully, this book should succeed in opening your eyes to her genius, since it brilliantly demonstrates her various creative skills mirrored within each of these separate stories.
28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
If you step off the path you will be lost forever.,
By Percy Toplis (Telford) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Bloody Chamber And Other Stories (Paperback)
Carter's re-writes of traditional European folk/fairy tales bring with them dark aspects of the human psyche that would have existed in the oral tradition but which became sanitised when written down in the 18th / 19th centuries as parables of instruction for children. In this collection Little Red Riding Hood (The Company of Wolves) is not saved by the woodcutter, but instead tames the beast by getting naked and giving vent to her awakening sexuality. Most of the stories in the collection focus on a girl on the cusp of womanhood, who steps off the path and is rewarded with the discovery of a sexuality that is not repressively phallocentric. Strong female protagonists contrast strongly with fairy tale stereotypes. Carter herself said that she was all for putting new wine in old bottles until the pressure of the new wine caused the old bottles to explode. That's about the best definition I can find for this collection of stories. Sexually provocative, gothic and sometimes very funny (Puss in Boots especially), The Bloody Chamber is a must-read book.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews |
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
![[Start the discussion]](http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/02/x-locale/communities/discussion_boards/start-new-discussion-sec._V192198663_.gif){kind=small}
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Fiction > Classics
- Books > Fiction > Contemporary Fiction
- Books > Fiction > Short Stories
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
