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Grimm's Last Fairytale (Paperback)

by Haydn Middleton (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Abacus; New edition edition (7 Dec 2000)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0349111219
  • ISBN-13: 978-0349111216
  • Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 12.8 x 1.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 1,486,013 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review

In Grimm's Last Fairytale it is September 1863 and professor Jacob Grimm is 78, visiting with Auguste, the daughter of his now deceased brother Willi, the places he knew as a young man. Around an elliptical retelling of Sleeping Beauty, past and present interweave: Jacob and his relationship with Auguste and her growing attraction to their servant Kummel; the lifelong devotion between Jacob and Willi; the collecting of their famous Grimm's Fairytales; the brother's love for Auguste's mother, Dortchen.
"Neither now nor ever shall I leave you". And once he had told her, without explaining why, that the line meant a great deal to him too, from even before she was born.

Tears ran down her cheeks.Story, story, story,she thought. With crushing self-consciousness she made herself smile, then said, "I want to know my own story. You used to say that everyone has a story."

Haydn Middleton has previously chronicled Arthurian legend in the Mordred cycle. Here, in making key to a book in which time is as unreliable as Germany's tangled forests, the power of remembered stories to remake the world, his narrative will appeal equally to those enchanted by Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood as Lindsay Clarke's The Chymical Wedding. With the enigmatic quality of a dream, Grimm's Last Fairytale is beautifully written and emotionally tense; that Jacob's liberal dream for a peaceful unified Germany is shadowed by premonitions of the Holocaust lends a further edge to an already compelling and sometimes breathtaking fiction. --Gary S. Dalkin


Review

A fascinating historical novel which recreates the life-story of the famous brothers who bequeathed to the world one of the most influential collections of stories in Western literature. It is a history that could almost be a fairytale itself, with its huge changes of fortune, tests of duty and honour, arrogant princes, lost loves and dark family secrets. Written in a series of vivid flashbacks this involving novel draws us deep into its very heart. (Kirkus UK)
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Average Customer Review
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderfully atmospheric and intelligent read, 6 Oct 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Grimm's Last Fairytale (Paperback)
This is a thoughtful yet gripping novel, which uses the technique of interwoven fairytale to consider the dark corners of the human psyche. The characters are well-drawn, and Haydn Middleton is particularly good at describing unfulfilled yearnings. The story is concerned with the quest for identity, both of the central characters and of Germany itself - and the novel contains dark forebodings of the future of the 'Volk', once its collective identity has been found. The historical detail is well-used and never dominates the power of the tale. I will never read 'Once upon a time' in quite the same way ...
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars MAGICAL ARTISTRY, 16 Dec 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: Grimm's Last Fairytale (Hardcover)
I've just read an advance copy of the American edition of this novel and am in thorough agreement with the English reviewers. The mind falls into spellbound superlatives in trying to pass on to new readers what they are in for. I could just give you the plot, or the three plots that weave into one picture of the German soul. But that would do the novel an injustice and never suggest the intimacy with which it sinks into the reader's spirit, since the dark places of the German soul, whatever else you think of them, are our own. For me, this is great art, quite the equal of Angela Carter's bejeweled tales, and filled with amazing images whose physical life lie like tapestry threads under your fingers.That's a poor way of putting it. Middleton is a master of epithet: "Her face would split a pitcher." I hope this novel gets the recogniton it deserves.
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