Accordingly, the imagery and motifs we associate most readily with fairytales – remote cottages, dark forests, strange spells, sudden metamorphoses, imperilled damsels, wicked stepmothers, strange trials – sit alongside graphic depictions of sex and violence. "Her Hair", for example, is a version of Rapunzel "Beasts", a version of Beauty and the Beast "Jacked" of Jack and the Beanstalk "Little Man" of Rumpelstiltskin.Īs is suggested by their wised-up, slightly trendy titles, these tales carry more than a trace of modernity. This slender volume – beautifully illustrated by the Japanese artist, Yuko Shimizu – is composed of 11 short fictions, most of them based on, or inspired by, the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. It is these questions that animate Cunningham's latest work (and first collection of short stories), A Wild Swan and Other Tales.
What, he asks, are we not being told? And what if there is life beyond what we think of as a story’s final page? This interest in revisiting existing works of literature comes from a sense of dissatisfaction and curiosity: Cunningham is magnetised by what stories leave out, unsettled by the nature of their endings.
More recently, The Snow Queen (2014) was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale of the same name. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of 1998, The Hours, he reimagined the narrative of Virginia Woolf's modernist masterpiece, Mrs Dalloway (1925). The American novelist Michael Cunningham has long been interested in the retelling of stories.
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