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Sea-Rabbit
Includes nine "ancient tales" of peasants, princesses, gargoyles, and more
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
272 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1987
2 people are currently reading
172 people want to read
About the author
Wendy Walker
23 books87 followersI am the author of The Secret Service, Stories Out of Omarie, The Sea-Rabbit, or, The Artist of Life, Blue Fire, My Man and Other Critical Fictions, The Camperdown Elm, and most recently, Sexual Stealing. I am a co-founder of The Writhing Society, a group that practices writing with constraints. My drawings are in the Flat Files of the Kentler International Drawing Space in Red Hook, Brooklyn. My website is www.wendywalker.com.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
November 27, 2019
Many others before have reconfigured classic story structures for their own ends, but Wendy Walker is the more memorable for being the less knowable. Fairy tales often gain their sense from their familiarity and embeddedness in culture. We can accept that these bizarre event take place, even believe them to have a kind of logic, because we know that x must follow y and that this is not unexpected. Simultaneously, the fairy tale form gains a great amount of its power from the deep and irreducible obscurity at the heart of any particular instance. Stories may take on allegorical or symbolic sense, but this may be a post-hoc addition to the images themselves, which exist in a kind of other space all their own. Walker, in presenting these new fairy tales -- often not new adaptations but fiery, weird originals -- cuts right back to the fundamental irrationality of the collective unconscious from which such stories emerged. This is much more difficult to do well than it might seem, and it makes these odd constructions, deft in word and structure, each a mysterious treasure to encounter.
June 7, 2019
It seems inevitable that any book of reworked (European) fairy tales must be compared to the popular collection by Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber. Both collections are conscious of language’s beauty and exude a passion for storytelling, but there is more variety and balance to be found in Walker’s The Sea-Rabbit. Most of the fairy tales that Walker has chosen are more obscure and so her versions were my first encounter. The most popular fairy tale is reworked from the source text, not the Disney dribble, and so the mellifluous name of Cinderella is actually the barbarous- and grimy-sounding Ashiepattle.
And in that story, “Ashiepattle,” we are graced with wonderful descriptions of the baroque dresses that the heroine wears on each succeeding night of a multi-night feast. In an interview, Walker explains how she sketched the dresses in order to better visualize and describe them in the story, like this fauna-based design: “the splendid bark-and-silver-colored fur thrown so carelessly across her shoulders, like a wolf escaping a parting shot; the ragged convolvulus of her enormous ballooning sleeves, iridescent blue, green, and white, like a splayed abstraction of mallards hung on a door; the dark dagging of the long nether sleeves, like parted crucial feathers of hawks aloft; the copper tessellated as the scales of an upstream salmon. The quilted lappets jutting from the waist of her vest recalled to him many gentle paws of foxes, hares, and even lions, slain and arranged in a victorious ring. He helplessly imagined unlacing that superficial bodice, to expose the hirsute white lining that so suddenly put him in mind of the bellies of dead doe, and a cheetah he had vanquished on an excursion to Barbary. The circular motif in the gown’s brocade being gathered from looseness at the ground to neat folds at the waist, contracted into an even impression of fanning feathers on a quail’s or pheasant’s throat.”
“The Cleverness of Elsie,” about a girl who either has the gift of foresight or a palpable imagination regarding the future, is written in anonymous first person. My best guest at the identity of this narrator is Elsie herself, imagining/predicting the future of how she imagines/predicts the future and the downfall that can bring when trying to navigate such a temporal labyrinth. The dissociation which sort of creates a double at the end of the story is some evidence in support of that. The helpless rigidity of events transpired is expressed in the final sentence: “…though I tell her story over and over again.” Something of a dash of sci-fi in this subtle concept and construction.
“The Cathedral” is a brief but wonderful Calvino-esque fable about how the menagerie of statues on the Notre Dame debate with each other for centuries about a particular topic. Not theology, as one might surmise.
“The True Marriage,” also brief, is written in a more basic fairy tale prose that belies, even heightens, the extremely dark nature, ending in a disturbing twist.
As it is with just about any story collection, some are more interesting or ‘successful’ than others, but all offer a fresh perspective and a modern psychology that is not as fleshed out in the Grimm tales. My favorite would have to be the humorous and captivating title story, about a princess who challenges the men of her kingdom to something of a game of hide and seek, granting the potential winner her hand in marriage and thus the kingdom. But the princess doesn’t seek, for she is able to stay in her tower and search every crevice and dimension of her kingdom with her eyes. Read the story to find out how this is possible. Oh, and if a man loses, she decorates the walls of the castle with his severed head. The princess already has such a full collection that it mostly brings her boredom.
There’s no good reason why this wonderful book is neglected while The Bloody Chamber remains one of the few books that people mention when wanting to instruct others on the importance of reading more female authors.
I look forward to reading Walker’s first and only novel, The Secret Service, in which those serving her ‘Majesty’ are able to transform into inanimate objects.
And in that story, “Ashiepattle,” we are graced with wonderful descriptions of the baroque dresses that the heroine wears on each succeeding night of a multi-night feast. In an interview, Walker explains how she sketched the dresses in order to better visualize and describe them in the story, like this fauna-based design: “the splendid bark-and-silver-colored fur thrown so carelessly across her shoulders, like a wolf escaping a parting shot; the ragged convolvulus of her enormous ballooning sleeves, iridescent blue, green, and white, like a splayed abstraction of mallards hung on a door; the dark dagging of the long nether sleeves, like parted crucial feathers of hawks aloft; the copper tessellated as the scales of an upstream salmon. The quilted lappets jutting from the waist of her vest recalled to him many gentle paws of foxes, hares, and even lions, slain and arranged in a victorious ring. He helplessly imagined unlacing that superficial bodice, to expose the hirsute white lining that so suddenly put him in mind of the bellies of dead doe, and a cheetah he had vanquished on an excursion to Barbary. The circular motif in the gown’s brocade being gathered from looseness at the ground to neat folds at the waist, contracted into an even impression of fanning feathers on a quail’s or pheasant’s throat.”
“The Cleverness of Elsie,” about a girl who either has the gift of foresight or a palpable imagination regarding the future, is written in anonymous first person. My best guest at the identity of this narrator is Elsie herself, imagining/predicting the future of how she imagines/predicts the future and the downfall that can bring when trying to navigate such a temporal labyrinth. The dissociation which sort of creates a double at the end of the story is some evidence in support of that. The helpless rigidity of events transpired is expressed in the final sentence: “…though I tell her story over and over again.” Something of a dash of sci-fi in this subtle concept and construction.
“The Cathedral” is a brief but wonderful Calvino-esque fable about how the menagerie of statues on the Notre Dame debate with each other for centuries about a particular topic. Not theology, as one might surmise.
“The True Marriage,” also brief, is written in a more basic fairy tale prose that belies, even heightens, the extremely dark nature, ending in a disturbing twist.
As it is with just about any story collection, some are more interesting or ‘successful’ than others, but all offer a fresh perspective and a modern psychology that is not as fleshed out in the Grimm tales. My favorite would have to be the humorous and captivating title story, about a princess who challenges the men of her kingdom to something of a game of hide and seek, granting the potential winner her hand in marriage and thus the kingdom. But the princess doesn’t seek, for she is able to stay in her tower and search every crevice and dimension of her kingdom with her eyes. Read the story to find out how this is possible. Oh, and if a man loses, she decorates the walls of the castle with his severed head. The princess already has such a full collection that it mostly brings her boredom.
There’s no good reason why this wonderful book is neglected while The Bloody Chamber remains one of the few books that people mention when wanting to instruct others on the importance of reading more female authors.
I look forward to reading Walker’s first and only novel, The Secret Service, in which those serving her ‘Majesty’ are able to transform into inanimate objects.
October 10, 2020
These stories are reworked fairy tales—most, if not all, with origins in the Grimms’ tales—some of which are so obscure or radically altered as to be unrecognizable to me. Wendy Walker’s use of language is lively and inventive—a real joy to read. Highly recommended for anyone who appreciates the subversive repurposing of fairy tales.
P. S. Walker is a gifted writer who deserves a wider readership, and her books are easy to find (this one is still available new from the publisher and there are plenty of copies on the used market).
P. S. Walker is a gifted writer who deserves a wider readership, and her books are easy to find (this one is still available new from the publisher and there are plenty of copies on the used market).
November 26, 2015
These are wonderful retellings of obscure (for me) European folk tales that transcend the genre through the author's masterful literary virtuosity. The point of view moves from first- to third-person, and the tense shifts from past to present, including extended passages in the future subjunctive. The descriptive passages have an idiosyncratic manner that imbues them with an enchantment that is perfect for these stories which seem to exist outside of historical time.
November 11, 2024
A charming collection of olden fables retold in lapidary prose. The best pieces here - the eponymous opener, a fairly faithful version of Hans-My-Hedgehog titled "The Contract with the Beast", and the unexpectedly poignant "Arnaud's Nyxie" - read almost like Kathryn Davis channeling the ghost of Marcel Schwob.
November 30, 2009
Crazy fairy tales. My favorite is about a wealthy landowner who is not respected by his tenants because he has no sons. So he imagines having a half hedgehog, half human baby that he carries everywhere as a weird way of thumbing his nose at everyone....
January 24, 2008
Wendy Walker, The Sea-Rabbit, or, The Artist of Life
(Sun and Moon, 1988)
Wendy Walker is one of America's finest living prose stylists. 1988's The Sea-Rabbit, her first release, is a bit less polished then her 1992 novel The Secret Service, but is no less a joy to read for it. This collection of nine fairy tales is sure to captivate any reader who appreciates language for the sake of language from beginning to end.
The stories herein are based on the usual fairy tales, though the reader will probably have to look pretty hard to find some of the more obscure originals (e.g. Grimm's "Hans the Hedgehog," the basis for the central story, "The Contract with the Beast"). Walker takes these skeletons and makes them her own with the addition of sumptuous detail. Anyone who's read The Secret Service will know what I mean by that; those unfamiliar with Walker's prose style may take that statement too lightly. It's hard to explain what differs about Walker's particular eye for detail (as opposed to, say, Clive Barker's or Robert Lowell's), but in reading a Walker tale there's always a sense that the details are just the slightest bit off. Even though you're in the land of the fairy tale, and so things should be somewhat out of kilter, there's that added layer. It's like constructing a science fiction world with physics laws that resemble our own in no way, and then breaking them so subtly that only the most astute physicists would notice, but lay readers will get the feeling that something's not exactly right.
Once you've got your head wrapped around that idea, pull out to the next layer, the conscious distortion of time and narration that keeps the reader's head spinning. For example, in "The Contract with the Beast"'s opening pages, the existence of Jack My Hedgehog (Hans, in the Grimm tale) is presented to us as a wild flight of fantasy by Jack's alleged father; a few pages on, Jack takes on a life of his own. A few pages later, the father enters back into play, telling the reader about his dream of the night before. And so on. One can never be sure whether he's stuck in fantasy within fantasy, or whether Jack's world is real within the story. And if it's not, who's doing the dreaming, Jack or his father? Much in the same way as first encountering Cormac McCarthy's distinctive prose style, the reader is forced to adapt to Walker's wheels within wheels; once you've figured out that "figuring it out" is a hopeless exercise best left to dissertation writers, it's a lot easier to go along for the ride and see where it takes us.
Walker should be one of America's best-loved and top-selling writers. As it stands, she's America's best-kept secret, and unjustly so. She deserves a much, much wider audience. **** ½
(Sun and Moon, 1988)
Wendy Walker is one of America's finest living prose stylists. 1988's The Sea-Rabbit, her first release, is a bit less polished then her 1992 novel The Secret Service, but is no less a joy to read for it. This collection of nine fairy tales is sure to captivate any reader who appreciates language for the sake of language from beginning to end.
The stories herein are based on the usual fairy tales, though the reader will probably have to look pretty hard to find some of the more obscure originals (e.g. Grimm's "Hans the Hedgehog," the basis for the central story, "The Contract with the Beast"). Walker takes these skeletons and makes them her own with the addition of sumptuous detail. Anyone who's read The Secret Service will know what I mean by that; those unfamiliar with Walker's prose style may take that statement too lightly. It's hard to explain what differs about Walker's particular eye for detail (as opposed to, say, Clive Barker's or Robert Lowell's), but in reading a Walker tale there's always a sense that the details are just the slightest bit off. Even though you're in the land of the fairy tale, and so things should be somewhat out of kilter, there's that added layer. It's like constructing a science fiction world with physics laws that resemble our own in no way, and then breaking them so subtly that only the most astute physicists would notice, but lay readers will get the feeling that something's not exactly right.
Once you've got your head wrapped around that idea, pull out to the next layer, the conscious distortion of time and narration that keeps the reader's head spinning. For example, in "The Contract with the Beast"'s opening pages, the existence of Jack My Hedgehog (Hans, in the Grimm tale) is presented to us as a wild flight of fantasy by Jack's alleged father; a few pages on, Jack takes on a life of his own. A few pages later, the father enters back into play, telling the reader about his dream of the night before. And so on. One can never be sure whether he's stuck in fantasy within fantasy, or whether Jack's world is real within the story. And if it's not, who's doing the dreaming, Jack or his father? Much in the same way as first encountering Cormac McCarthy's distinctive prose style, the reader is forced to adapt to Walker's wheels within wheels; once you've figured out that "figuring it out" is a hopeless exercise best left to dissertation writers, it's a lot easier to go along for the ride and see where it takes us.
Walker should be one of America's best-loved and top-selling writers. As it stands, she's America's best-kept secret, and unjustly so. She deserves a much, much wider audience. **** ½
September 20, 2023
Wonderful retellings and fairy tales with a contemporary (or not!) spin.
Read
January 28, 2008These tales vary, but the author often maintains the spare world and characterization of a fairy tale while utilizing full scene and entering deeply into the characters' emotions. This mismatch provides neither the enjoyment of a tale nor the immersion of a 'modern' short story.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews