Tales of Innocence and Experience

by Eva Figes

'This is a story of childhood, of innocence and its fragility. Of the particular bond between the very old and the very young, living on the edge, sharing the moment. It is a special kind of love story. The wolf, anyhow, is always part of the plot.'

Tales of Innocence and Experience is a captivating exploration of the relationship between a grandmother and her granddaughter as a second baby is about to be born. Alive to the special sweetness of this relationship, Eva Figes also explores the darker side of childhood. How in fairy tales such as 'Snow White', 'Little Red Riding Hood' and 'Hänsel and Gretel' difficult emotions like jealousy and anger, fear of death and abandonment are evoked and transformed by the storyteller's art.

When the little girl begins asking innocent questions about her grandmother's own childhood, she unwittingly opens a door into the past. We are told the tale of the author's privileged Berlin childhood, which was brutally shattered when her family escaped from the Nazis to England, leaving her grandparents behind. But now she is so deep in the forest of the past she finds she must confront the demons that have haunted her since, as a thirteen-year-old, she came to understand how those beloved grandparents died.
The relationship between innocence and experience is complex. So while the inquisitive child opens a door into the dark, by doing so she also allows her grandmother the chance we all seek to sneak back into the garden of innocence.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Eva Figes (born Eva Unger) is a German-born English author.

Figes has written novels, literary criticism, studies of feminism, and vivid memoirs relating to her Berlin childhood and later experiences as a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany. She arrived in Britain in 1939 with her parents and a younger brother. Figes is now a resident of north London and the mother of the academic Orlando Figes and writer Kate Figes.

In the 1960s she was associated with an informal group of experimental British writers influenced by Rayner Heppenstall, which included Stefan Themerson, Ann Quin and its informal leader, B. S. Johnson.

Figes's fiction has certain similarities with the writings of Virginia Woolf. The 1983 novel, Light, is an impressionistic portrait of a single day in the life of Claude Monet from sunrise to sunset.

Reviews

[Trisha · Rating 4 out of 5]

The main thematic focus of the book is the loss of childhood innocence we all suffer and the varied forms that loss can take. For our narrator, a grandmother, the loss was sudden, inexplicable, and difficult. The story is told through fairy tales, how they help us make meaning, how they connect adult to child, how they teach children fear, darkness, and survival.

One of my favorite sections in the book is a collection of three consecutive chapters that reveal Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Sleeping Beauty in the after, the demons and nightmares and challenges that face them once their tale is over. Figes's predictions of these heroes' lives feel authentic and are certainly evocative and melancholy.

I don't think I've ever read a book and marked so many passages. These pages are full of beauty, in thought and word. A few gems:

"Absolute innocence is absolute trust, which is so horrifying."

"The forest, I think but do not say, represents darkness, that which cannot be civilized, or brought under control. Cut down the trees, tame the landscape, but its shadow will always lurk on the edge of human consciousness...the heart of darkness still beats in its modern guise.

For obvious reasons, this quote truly speaks to me: "For days my daughter looks bruised and battered by the experience...She knows what she did not know before, that she is merely a link in the chain, to be used and discarded. Women lose their innocence, not with the loss of virginity, but with childbirth...our eyes meet in a new understanding...Now the shock of the oldest law, spoken by God to the first woman, is in her eyes...the purpose of birth is also the purpose of death". There is nothing quite like children to remind you of your inescapable death.

The one quote that truly sums up this book: "How old is old enough for a child to know the world for what it is?" A question I struggle with almost daily.

Even after revising this review, I'm just not pleased. I can't seem to find the right words to convey how powerful I found this book. Apparently this will be one of those books that I just can't talk about properly. I guess I'll just leave you with: I heartily recommend reading this one. It's beautiful in form and content.

[Annabel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another trauma fiction read for the MA! I liked this book, but found it hard to follow at times and slightly overly poetic. A very metaphorical commentary on childhood trauma and loss of innocence growing up. Part three of the book onwards was more interesting to read for me.

[Jeffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Figes really does a wonderrful job about thinking about the fairy tales in terms of how they might be received by children and in the context of her own childhood experience - she's an amazing writer!

[Cody · Rating 3 out of 5]

HOUSEKEEPING 2025:

The example that proves the rule: the later one gets in Figes' bibliography, the lesser the returns. While still damn good and better than most, within the Figes-verse it nabs no high than middle-tier. Fucking problem with franchises...

[Ronald Ruskin · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent book about a grandmother and grandchild, the relationship of connection and loss of a grandmother who endured the Holocaust.

[Eleanor Toland · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came to this unusual book through Marina Warner's excellent study of the fairy tale Once Upon a Time. It's not a memoir, not quite, more of an extended reflective essay on storytelling, memory and the loss of innocence, framed around the author's conversations with her young granddaughter.

Within a short book, Eva Figes ranges across a remarkably wide range of topics, including youth and age, doll's houses, the Garden of Eden, men with brown uniforms and armbands, displacement, bereavement, and fairy tales, especially the story of Little Red Riding Hood, which the author returns to again and again.

Figes admits that her relationship with her beloved granddaughter is partially based on vicariously experiencing the world through the eyes of someone innocent and uncynical. As the book goes Figes's tone grows increasingly contemptuous of the adult world, denouncing religion as a lie, fairy tales as a consolatory fantasy, and childhood a brief period of innocence soon torn away and replaced by something drab and joyless. Childhood and innocence mean happiness, adulthood and knowledge mean misery. Her only hope for her granddaughter is that:

"Just for a little longer, let her believe that mercy has a human heart, pity a human face."

While reading out fairy tales, she privately constructs bitterly cynical sequels for her own benefit. The final paragraph of her unforgiving sequel to Rapunzel goes:

Things merely looked the same, but nothing was. The household was careful not to discuss their nightmares, and averted their eyes from windows which overlooked the surrounding countryside. The huge hedge was trimmed but not uprooted: it had its uses.

These 'sequels' are revealed as allegories for Figes's own traumatic childhood, fleeing the Nazification of Europe. And the reason she keeps coming back to the story of Little Red Riding Hood lies in the fate of her own grandmother...

Elegiac and mournful, Tales of Innocence and Experience is occasionally bleak but not without moments of redemption, and ultimately ends in a place nowhere near as dark as its beginning. Like all good fairy stories, it's a book about transformation.

[Wyatt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm interested in how Figes uses the act of a grandmother reading fairy tales to her granddaughter as an entry into questions of childhood innocence, how long it can be preserved before knowledge of the world becomes inevitable. The book is told in short, meditative chapters as it winds its way to the center of the dark forest, the narrator's memories of her own grandmother, the reasons for her grandparents' death and the family's exile to London, the reasons for her father's change and her mother's silence, her realization that they had spun a web of lies to protect her. But knowledge is inevitable. A haunting book about the difficulty of understanding the unspeakable and how the language of fairy tales can help articulate it.

[Katharine Holden · Rating 5 out of 5]

My copy is subtitled, simply, An Exploration. It doesn't have the Grandmother/Grandmother lengthy subtitle which makes it sound like a trivial book. It isn't trivial. It's a wonderful and disturbing take on reading old fairy tales to a child and all the while seeing in them deeper meanings and remembrances resulting from having been a child survivor of the Holocaust. Wonderfully written and profound.

[Ellen Winingar- lacrosse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great story, shows the interaction between grandmother and grand child as the grandmother reflects one her life story.