Day Sixty-Seven

6/7

The Book: Snow White by Donald Barthelme

ISBN: 0-684-82479-5

Suggested By: Brandon Shuler

Where: Home

When: 3-3:30P

Music: Beirut

Company: The Family

Pages: 1-55 (55)

The Lead In: Interestingly enough, to me anyway, I just got into this comic, Fables. In it, the characters from all the famous fables, Snow White, Three Pigs, Golidlocks, etc, have been run out of their fable world and now are forced to live under the radar in NY. Interesting premise. Beyond that, my wife’s book club read Wicked for last month. And now, Snow White.

The 411 on the 55: Barthelme takes a complicated approach to writing, almost convoluted. He uses multiple perspectives, typically without warning or clue to which he is using. To further complicate matters, he writes in a very choppy style which restricts flow, often times ending pages mid page. After rereading it, that looks like I didn’t like day one. That would be incorrect. I liked it very much.

This is the other side of Snow White. The one the fairy tale left out. Snow White has sex with the seven dwarves in the shower room each night, one after the other. She has become bored with it, and so has one of the dwarves. Rather than the comical names given them by Disney, these dwarves have normal names: Bill, Kevin, Edward, Hubert, Henry, Clem, and Dan. Snow White has taken up writing poetry to cope with her life, yet will not show it any of her lovers.  

Line of the Day: “The seven of them only add up to the equivalent of about two real mean, as we know them from the films and from our childhood, when there were giants on the earth.” pg 48

The Fact on the Fiction:  Scholars have uncovered parallels between the legendary Snow White and Margarete von Waldeck (1533-1554). Like Snow White, Margarete was a strikingly attractive young woman. Like Snow White she had a problematic relationship with her stepmother. She grew up in the mining town of Waldeck where small children known as dwarfs worked in the mines. At 16, Margarete moved to Brussels. There, she attracted the romantic interest of several nobles, including Phillip II of Spain. Phillip II hoped to marry her because she was beautiful, but she became ill as a result of poisoning and died at the age of 21. Wikipedia