Le Vaillant petit tailleur

by Éric Chevillard

On se croyait quitte de ces sornettes, pour parler franc. L’enfance est derrière nous. Et le conte du vaillant petit tueur de mouches est une vieille histoire. Or voici qu’un écrivain prétend soudain devenir l’auteur conscient et responsable qui fait défaut à celle-ci, enfantée négligemment par l’imagination populaire, soumise à tous les avatars de la tradition orale puis recueillie en ce lamentable état par les frères Grimm au début du XIXe siècle. Il a des ambitions. Il compte bien élever le frêle personnage qui en est le héros au rang de figure mythique. Noble projet, mais quel est-il, ce héros, le vaillant petit tailleur ou l’écrivain lui-même ? Dans un monde fabuleux, peuplé de géants et de licornes, cette dernière hypothèse pourrait être moins extravagante qu’il n’y paraît.

Genres: Fiction, France, Roman

256 pages, Paperback

First published October 3, 2003

About the author

Éric Chevillard is a French novelist. He has won awards for several novels including La nébuleuse du crabe in 1993, which won the Fénéon Prize for Literature.

His work often plays with the codes of narration sometimes to the degree that it is even difficult to understand which story is related in his books, and has consequently been classified as postmodern literature. He has been noted for his associations with Les Éditions de Minuit, a publishing-house largely associated with the leading experimental writers composing in French today.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Seven with one blow.” Who doesn’t know this famous line from Brothers Grimmʼs famous fairy tale?
Will Éric Chevillard tell the story of The Valiant Little Tailor in his own postmodernistic way?

“Marmalade! Delicious marmalade!”
This time the little tailor hears, and he delights in what he hears, his ears are full of marmalade. He throws open his window, leans out into the street, and falls to his death.

Don’t worry… It’s a slip of a pen, probably… Or the raconteur intentionally pulls the wool over our eyes… Deliberate false steps… Philosophical diversions… But anyway the story can’t go on without flies…

I like animals, even the soft-shelled crab and the warty toad shaped by a drunkard from his diseased liver, with his own trembling hands, even the hyena who wishes I was dead and the cobra who would gladly lend him his glasses for the purpose, even the dung beetle, the shark, and the earwig, but I hate flies, do you hear me, do you hear them, itʼs intolerable, if I were to learn that every last fly had abruptly and permanently disappeared from the face of this earth Iʼd be in heaven.

Seven flies are dead… And the brave little tailor is off to adventure in the big, wide world… He surmounts all the obstacles and defeats all the foes… So now he is rightfully going to collect the reward…

And indeed, the little tailor intends to be richly rewarded for his troubles. He ogles the princess, a pretty thing with big, dark eyes, long, silky lashes, a lithe neck holding high her slender, delicate head, four dainty, fragile feet, reddish-brown fur, he wants her as his wife in spite of the ridiculous rumors circulating about her, which he prefers to laugh off, can you believe some people claim she turns into a doe every night?

Some adventurers are valiant and some prefer to adventure inside books.

[Marquise · Rating 1 out of 5]

I recall "The Valiant Little Tailor" from my first book of fairy tales, with its beautiful and colourful illustrations, and the quirky and courageous little man that becomes a hero by accident and self-confidently proclaims a mundane task, killing seven flies, as if it were the most heroic deed ever, on par with Hercules' feats.

So I was so expecting to enjoy this retelling, which promised to tell the "true" story from the little tailor's mouth and humour in spades. Whilst it did fulfill the first promise, it was a difficult read, so meandering and so full of tangents and digressions I would get lost and lose interest all the time; often not knowing what exactly the point was, and other times getting bored at the tone of the narrator, that was more acid and gratuitous garrulousness peppered with cheap shots at the Grimms for no reason that I can tell than be a contrarian. What was the point of insulting the Grimms' female sources, for example?

And the humour wasn't doing it for me either. I love irony and parody, but here I wasn't laughing as much as feeling unimpressed and wondering what I was missing that the promised humour didn't seem to be there for me. In the end, it was a hard-to-read stream of consciousness-style retelling that I'm still not sure had a real plot as much as was an opportunity to talk and talk endlessly.

I received an ARC through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Sofia · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's a meandering tale, with Chevillard going off on lengthy tangents, which took away my focus from the main story, triggering my boredom switch.

An ARC gently provided by author/publisher via Netgalley

[Andy Weston · Rating 2 out of 5]

Chevillard retells a familiar tale, but expands it (greatly) with his own commentary.

I've not long finished reading another re-telling of a Grimm take, Alma Katsu's The Wehrwolf, which I enjoyed, but found far from being dark. At one stage, early in the book, she makes the point that most of the tales of the brothers' Grimm were originally far darker than we know them now (Cinderella, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel).

I would much rather read those originals, wherever they may exist, rather than this piffle.

[Zoé · Rating 3 out of 5]

Plutôt compliqué à lire et à comprendre

[Jacob Wren]

Three short passages from The Valiant Little Tailor:


*


But what’s the hurry, why launch straight into the event that will set this story in motion? It would be so nice to linger here a while. Sitting peacefully in the golden light of this summer morning. Why spoil the moment? You do realize, this is a juggernaut of a story we have ahead of us, mile-a-minute, one plot twist after another, and never a lull between them: once we get going, we’re not going to have many chances to catch our breath.


*


My project included a wealth of ideas never dreamed of before. It had nothing to do with magic, it was all about cleverness and ingenuity. The fairy with her wondrous wand loses the use of one arm: she’ll never perform the drumroll that would herald the new age.


*


Let me take this opportunity to remind you that verisimilitude is the aim of a liar.


*

[omilojevic · Rating 1 out of 5]

Neuspela parodija na mnogo poznatije delo. Uz sav trud nisam mogla da pređem tridesetu stranu.

[Nolan Skochdopole]

3.5

[Francois Kersulec · Rating 4 out of 5]

A partir du conte des frères Grimm, le vaillant petit tailleur, Eric Chevillard s'autorise à le réécrire, compléter et annoter : nouvelles fins possibles, critiques, digressions personnelles ou liées à l'histoire, autres extraits de contes. Il transforme ainsi le conte classique du départ en roman humoristique et instructif.
De très bons passages drôles, incisifs, imaginatifs, alternent avec des passages plus longs ou moins rythmés. Libre au lecteur de piocher et sauter les parties qui ne l'intéressent pas, même l'auteur le conseille parfois.

[Emelinemimie · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Tom Pouce s'est glissé pour la nuit dans une coquille d'escargot désaffectée, au prix tout de même de quelques contorsions (un soupçon de réalisme suffit pour accréditer la plus improbable fantaisie, j'adore la littérature). "

[Jean-denis Crouhy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Virtuose !

[Léanne Gagné · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ni queue, ni tête.