Cinderella stories

I recently stumbled across two GREAT versions of the Cinderella story that made me think about it in a completely new way. The first was The Rough-Face Girl, an Algonquin Indian version of the tale, retold by Rafe Martin: absolute gorgeous. The girl's two older sisters set out, decked out in their finest, to 'marry the Invisible Being,' only to be exposed as being ignorant of his appearance (true nature). The rough-face girl goes next, piecing together her bridal attire out of simple, broken things, but when challenged, she speaks clearly of the Invisible Being for, she says, she sees him everywhere in the natural world. He and his sister (the guardian) see her immediately as she is inside, and not the outside, and accept her joyfully. It's pretty amazing. No fairy godmother needed to help Cinderella get to or catch the prince's eye.

imdb link

The second thing was the Cantonese movie "Jump" (2009), in which a country girl moves to Shanghai and works in a factory and as a custodian at a dance school in order to pursue her dream of becoming a hip-hop/street dancer, attracting the notice of a 'prince' along the way. Sounds like standard stuff on the surface, doesn't it? But for one thing, this Cinderella works WAY harder than any other I've come across. Half the movie is montages of her singing, dancing, laughing as she cleans toilets, mops floors, hauls garbage, irons, sews, etc. What is really amazing about this version, though, is that the film doesn't feel sorry for her. They don't present her circumstances as miserable or depressing. There is a fantastic moment in which she curiously asks the prince on their first 'date' what's the happiest day he can remember. Surprised, he comes up with something involving money. Equally surprised, she tells him the happiest day she can remember was one morning, working in the fields, and seeing a rainbow after a rainstorm.

What I realized is that I've always thought of the transformation in the Cinderella story as a reward for all her previous, miserable, hard work. She's earned that tiara. What these two versions made me realize is that you can 'read' Cinderella as the kind of sage Joseph Campbell refers to as 'Master of the Two Worlds': someone who has seen through the world of maya to the underlying beauty, and that is what makes her worthy of her final ascension (Campbell talks about 'Marriage to the Goddess' because most of the stories he looks at feature male heroes). The story takes on a gnostic quality and becomes about values, contrasting those who cannot see and are stuck in the world of appearance with the one who sees 'underneath,' whose true beauty can be recognized 'within.'

Hungry Tigress (The Way of the Tigress Book 2), Jade Lee

Ignore the cover.

I thought I had this book pretty much pegged as a period erotic romance set in 1900 Shanghai. There's a lot of talk about channeling sensual pleasure into a spiritual quest which I took as tongue-in-cheek right up until the ecstatic vision in which an angel literally tells the hero and heroine they are beings of love and the heroine realizes:

     "All the tiny pieces of herself--her body, her soul, her heart and mind--all those things were made up of love. That was the core of who she was; that was at the center of everything. She was a creature of love--created by love to embody love, and to express love in all its myriad forms. She had merely forgotten.
     "As had everyone else. Because they too--Zou Tun, her father, every soul on the planet--came from the same source. They all had the same center of love. They all had merely forgotten."

It would sound hokey if I didn't believe it (although I'm less sure about the angel part). So there I was, at three-quarters of the way through, completely rethinking what the book was about. And then there are the Lao Tzu quotes which begin each chapter--I got a surprising amount from reflecting on those along the way.

Lee gets kudos in my estimation for not just hinting around, but daring to explode reality-as-we-know-it in her narrative. It's a very powerful moment. One of the most interesting things to me, however, is how the characters try to integrate their vision back into everyday life, which turns out to be really hard. One of Lee's profound insights, I think, is that lying damages the connection to whatever the divine is.

The Shanghai Factor, Charles McCarry

I picked this up thinking I was in for a contemporary spy novel--something à la Jason Bourne--only to find it's really more a Kafka-esque work of existentialist fiction, which was utterly fascinating. The narrator wanders through the story, fundamentally unclear on what it is he's doing, or why. He receives cryptic messages he often doesn't know, or remember, how to decipher, or even if they are real messages. He interacts with people who might be friends, or enemies, or complete strangers. A lot of the fun of the book is the clever, fencing dialogue in which each party tries to mislead or at least reveal as little as possible. There is a great deal of humor in the book, all very dry. 

The clearest statement of the existentialist underpinning of the book comes on page 109:

the truth was that I had become a secret agent because I could not bear for another minute the pointlessness of life in the real world.... If the craft meant nothing, at least it was done in something like absolute privacy, as if everything was happening in another time, another universe, another state of consciousness. Its joys were palpable. For years I had been left alone to enjoy the pleasures of learning to speak and read an ancient and beautiful language and the company of a brilliant woman who loved sex. If that wasn't a blessed state of being, what was? What difference did it make if the work I did meant nothing, accomplished nothing, burned up money on an epic scale? What human endeavor was any different?

Colin Wilson would have recognized this man at once as belonging to his collection of "outsiders."

I spent a large portion of my teens, twenties, and thirties--well, let's just say the bulk of my young intellectual life--wildly enamored of Existentialism (although I never liked Sartre, who I think is overrated). I still like its focus on subjective experience, its questioning of values, and the driving search for meaning. The problem, I think, is when someone gives up on finding anything. Or, like Terry Gilliam's movies suggest, gives up on the external, real world in favor of the creative interior of the imagination.

Becoming a parent changed everything for me, although not quite in the way I had expected or hoped, but I became keenly, painfully aware of dependence and responsibility. When a child needs you to feed or clothe or comfort them, questions of 'meaning' and the futility of action really evaporate. If they don't--if there's still some 'maybe I will, maybe I won't,' or 'I could, but why?'--I think that qualifies as being a sociopath, unable to empathically connect or experience another human being's joy or pain. The outsiders Wilson studied were all men, unattached, (white). They are in some ways too free, too independent. They don't need others and don't see that others might need them. Because they can do whatever they like, they don't see a reason to do any of it. Even staying alive doesn't seem like a worthwhile endeavor. (I am loosely characterizing.)

It's revealing to me that the narrator of Shanghai Factor moves through his world without real human connection. The closest he comes to an enduring relationship is his regret over losing Mei, (the brilliant woman who loved sex), another spy who never asks him questions or tells him anything about herself. When he is told the missing Mei has been imprisoned and probably tortured, it doesn't change the trajectory of his action. In fact, he finds (yet another) woman to sleep with. When he learns Mei left him to have an abortion, for which he was 50% genetically responsible, he shrugs it off (and returns to another woman). Nothing sticks. Nothing motivates. There is a deadness inside, which he (I suspect the author himself) might just say is 'how he is,' or be perversely proud of as a sign of intellectual superiority, but I think it's a failure to make the effort to engage. Even if you do not see a need for other people, you ought to be able to see you are needed. If there's no meaning to acting for yourself, there are other people who desperately need you to act on their behalf.

It doesn't have to be children, of course. Having an artistic endeavor (or long-term project) can also powerfully orient one's life. But I've become more and more interested in the social component to human thriving. I heard a fantastic podcast recently in which Ezra Klein interviewed Johann Hari about his new book, which interests me greatly as an antidote:

The Dry, Jane Harper

Intriguing mystery set in contemporary rural Australia--Harper doesn't need me to praise her because she's already garnered awards, movie rights, and a sequel, for which I congratulate her. The book is oddly gripping, with a nice, surprise twist, although I personally wanted the mystery to be more complex. Still works.

A great deal of the book is unearthing the events and relationships of the past, told in a series of italicized flashbacks. I prefer to watch characters relieve their past memories in real time as opposed to these self-contained flashbacks, but it works, right up until the end, where the whole thing falls apart: Unable to narrate the last, unsolved murder, Harper resorts to the main character finding a diary and then switches to a third-person omniscient italicized flashback--information, in other words, that neither the writer nor the reader of the diary would have access to. This was a deal-breaker for me. I think as an author you either come up with a different way to convey that, or you scrap the entire strategy of telling the past through flashbacks.

The Man of the House, Evelyn Ellis

I found Ellis because she publishes in a consortium with Catherine Lloyd. I thought the premise of this book--a forbidden romance between a governess and the "Mr. Hyde" side of her employer Dr. Jekyll's character--was intriguing. I would love to write a Jekyll/Hyde book someday, but in the style of Wilkie Collins' Woman in White (which I love): a series of Victorian-era court documents.

Love Rising, Catherine Lloyd

This the last book in Lloyd's 4-part "Mandrake Falls" series, and you do need to read them in order because the books build on each other in a really fun way. The couple in Book 1 ("The Jilting") probably moved me the most, but I think Book 4 is the best constructed and most satisfying. I enjoy Lloyd's Gothic romances, but it's the decent men, the considerate, kind men struggling to do what's right who make my knees weak. I love these books!