Friday open thread: retellings

[dolorosa_12]

Welcome to the end of another working week! I'm kind of shattered, and am looking forward to a weekend with no social obligations, and lots of cooking.

This week's open thread prompt is in response to a rather disappointing book, which happened to be a retelling of a work of classic literature (I'll say more about it later when I do my Sunday post wrapping up the week's reading). I gave it a 3-star rating, and on reflection feel that that's being overly generous. There are a couple of reasons why it failed as a retelling, and many more why it failed as a work of fiction in general, but in any case, it got me thinking about retellings, and what makes them work or not.

Therefore, the prompt is: tell me about a retelling that succeeded for you — and why — or tell me about a retelling that failed for you, and why.

I'm specifically interested in retellings rather than adaptations. There can be a shift in medium (the book I'm talking about is a retelling of a stage play), but it needs to do more than just make a broadly identical new version of an older work. If it helps: Clueless is a retelling of Emma, whereas Mamma Mia! the film is an adaptation of the Mamma Mia! musical.

Comments

[yarnofariadne]

I kind of answered this question in an essay I hope might be of interest - I wrote it as I was re-releasing some of my own retellings so an element of it is self-promo, but I wanted to talk about what I value in retellings, what makes them work for me, and what shapes my ethos in approaching them myself.

[pauraque]

At the front of my mind because I just read it recently: Nalo Hopkinson's short story "The Glass Bottle Trick" is a retelling of the Bluebeard folktale that really worked for me. I liked how it kept the shape of the traditional narrative while leveraging the contemporary setting to draw a chillingly realistic portrait of how the protagonist internalizes her husband's abusive control over her.

[chestnut_pod]

Robin McKinley! I like all of RMcK's retellings, but she wrote one that is simply flawless: Deerskin, which is a retelling of Allerleirauh/Donkeyskin. It's at once a successful novel on its own terms (perhaps the only RMcK novel that has an ending?) and has that almost ficcish quality of more-than-the-sum-of-parts intertextuality. Without "subverting" or negating or ignoring what makes a fairytale a fairytale, it also makes a convincing and moving novelisticpsychological portrait of the protagonist of a fairytale. It's grounded and magical at once in a way that authors often try but rarely succeed at to such a degree.

[isis]

James by Percival Everett is a jaw-dropping remix of Huckleberry Finn (and probably the best book I read this year).

[lyr]

I love re-tellings (and write them myself), so there's too many to name. But here are the first three that jump to mind:

I found Pat Barker's Silence of the Girls, a re-telling of The Illiad from Briseis' POV, very effective. It is the first of a trilogy that follows the survivors back to Greece. It is horrifying and shattering in real, human ways; it is a tragedy of a level that the original cannot reach. But it also carries a resigned survival and fortitude, as the women who endured the "heroic" fates of the men around them must have had to do. I was hooked from this part on:
“As later Priam comes secretly to the enemy camp to plead with Achilles for the return of his son Hector's body, he says: "'I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son."
Those words echoed round me, as I stood in the storage hut, surrounded on all sides by the wealth Achilles had plundered from burning cities. I thought: "And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers.”

And I don't know if you know the 14th-century Chinese classic Water Margin, but S.L. Huang's The Water Outlaws transforms it into a gender-bent, queer, stirring call to revolution against corruption and exploitation by the wealthy and powerful. It's a LOT of fun, and it succeeds for me especially because it co-opts the mission of the original from xenophobic nation-building to inclusive revolution.

Speaking of such transformations, that's also what I like about Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country and Destroyer of Worlds. I really like the feel of Lovecraftian mythos, but the original text is so infused with H. P. Lovecraft's racial and ethnic prejudices. Ruff flips that around when he centers characters of color and tells those stories from their point of view. I love the way that also allows the creeping cosmic horror to tangle up with the banal horror of racism in America to make new points about what evil and resistance to it really mean.

[corvidology]

I'm extremely fond of Bride and Prejudice.

It's an inspired choice to make Mr. Darcy an American and the adaptation to a current day Indian family of daughters works beautifully.

Also, if you can watch it without chair dancing I don't know what to tell you! ;D

It's from Gurinder Chadha, who also directed Bend it Like Beckham.

[likeadeuce]

I think I might mot like retellings, which is funny because I often enjoy riffs on them in fanfic and I liked the idea of the genre when I first became aware of it and thought I wanted to write in it, but I can't think of one that I absolutely loved (or many that I even finished).

[ambyr]

Two favorites off the top of my head:

The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, by Genevieve Valentine, is a riff on the Twelve Dancing Princesses in which the princesses are the daughters of a rich, controlling father in Jazz-age New York who slip away each night to dance at the city's speakeasies. I thought it did a great job sketching characterization for a cast of almost overwhelming size (twelve sisters, plus various love interests and other characters) as well as examining the ways the girls' own fears makes it hard for them to see or trust potential ways out.

Springtime Will Kill You, one of my favorite fanfics, Greek myth as noir. The main plot is Hades and Persephone, but the protagonist is Orpheus, and I love this most for picking up the story of Orpheus and Eurydice after the myth leaves off and asking the question: did she want to go?

[gingicat]

I am currently enjoying EPIC: The Musical, a retelling of the Odyssey. It's an interpretation that I argue with (to the Younger Kid's amusement), but it's compellingly done.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbqsLXjyXw3iDPFOcGU13VL0E7lEtlup7&si=3kdrnI1m_8k7jwj2

[morbane]

I recently re-read Gail Carlson Levine's Ella Enchanted. It still delights me, and I like how it paid close attention to the impacts of a fairy godmother's life-changing "blessing" as a source of conflict, picking up an idea from something previously laid down in literature. On this re-reading, my impression was that the ending suffered a little from being a closer adherence to a particular fairy tale than most of the rest was. I couldn't quite suspend disbelief about Ella's ball scheme and the reasons she gave herself for it. It is a lot of fun reading a re-telling and watching to see how this or that particular element will come into play, but it has to feel natural too.

Ella and Char and Mandy and the rest are such lovely vivid characters that this did not really mar the story. It just didn't strike me as its strongest part.

[charlottenewtons]

I really enjoyed that phase in the 90s/00s where they would make teen movies out of classic literature, 10 things I hate about you being my favourite.

[nerakrose]

10 things I hate about you is one of my all time favourite retellings :D I didn't actually read Taming of the Shrew until I was around twenty, and 10 things came out around...idk, turn of the millennium? I was around 11 or 12 when I saw it the first time (on dvd, well after it was in cinemas) and it's remained one of my all time favourite films since then. reading the Shakespeare text it was based on only made me love it more tbh. (I've yet to see a staging of the play itself.)

I've not read Emma (I have only seen adaptations) so I can't say how good Clueless is as a retelling of the book, but I do love it as its own thing. I'll have to read Emma eventually, of all the Jane Austen adaptations I've seen the ones of Emma have always been my favourite. there's something about the specific way she fucks up and then has to live with those mistakes that is deeply appealing to my monkey brain for reasons I can't articulate, and since all the adaptations so far have that element, that must be from the book.

I haven't read any of the myriad Greek retelling novels that have been put out in the past 5-ish years. none of them have appealed to me enough to want to crack one open. They're all supposedly good and feminist and whatnot and have nice covers and I see another one and I'm just Tired :'') I don't want yet another story with feminist tag slapped onto it just because it's about a named female character, and I resent the expectation that I, too, must love it because it's an empowering feminist retelling. I'm waiting for this trend to pass so we can get onto other stories to re-tell.

oh but that reminds me, a while ago there was this sci-fi comic called ODY-C which was a retelling of the Odyssey, in space. I don't think I ever finished reading it, for various reasons, but I was looking into writing an academic paper about it at the time. my MA thesis was about a different epic poetry retelling in comic form - the story of Kullervo, from the Finnish epic Kalevala - so looking at ODY-C was relevant in that context. I was also looking at various Marvel comic runs dealing with Norse mythology. Tom Shippey of dubious LOTR expert fame came to my uni for a guest lecture specifically about retelling of mythology in fantasy and science fiction (the lecture was shit, he spent the whole time "analysing" the fantasy novels HE WROTE HIMSELF for usage of mythology and when another attendee called him out on it during questions he just straight up said that of course one can analyse one's own work. uhm, not when you made all the narrative decisions yourself, you fucking hack.) anyway, a different attendee beat me to asking him about Marvel and Norse mythology and he very dismissively said that the marvel comics were so far removed from the source material that they couldn't be classified as retellings anymore, at which point I saw red and left. I'd been reviewing like 70 years of marvel comics canon at that point and it was clear he'd barely even glanced at them. as whole? yeah, you can't really call it an intentional retelling? but disparate runs draw more closely on specific stories from mythology and those, in an isolated context, are absolutely worth looking at. and that's not even getting into how all the various comic canons and versions of the same characters are a kind of mythology in itself. Norse mythology had multiple versions of the same story too.

so anyway, ODY-C and Kullervo and various marvel comics about Thor and Loki - as retellings, they were interesting to look at because you had so many different things to look at. the form, the artwork, the genre. and regardless of my personal feelings about these retellings (look, I don't think the Kullervo graphic novel was particularly good and I can't in good conscience recommend it to anyone) they were interesting to study because when you re-tell a story, the parts you choose to show, or change, or leave out, say so much. the Kullervo retelling, for instance, was created when the artist was a young unemployed man in Finland in the early 90s, when the economy was in shambles. he wasn't able to get it published then, but then the 50th anniversary for Kalevala came around in 2009 and he got a deal. even before I found out that particular circumstance of publication, it was obvious from the retelling that there was a lot of anger and dejection in the work, a lot of specific hatred towards a society that had failed. Kullervo in the Kalevala is kind of an outlier of a story to begin with, and the the guy who compiled the Kalevala didn't just compile it, he composed parts of it to connect it all into an epic whole, and other scholars have concluded that the Kullervo story is the most 'doctored' with story, because it draws so clearly on established classic tropes, classic in the meaning of the Greek antique stuff that the West has been wanking off to for however many centuries. Kullervo is a classic tragedy. it has a whole damn Oedipus plotline that doesn't exist anywhere else in Finnish mythology, for one! the graphic novel retelling takes an already tragic story and uses it to shine a spotlight onto modern Finnish society to say 'look at this antiquated bullshit. it's broken.' one can then agree or disagree with that statement, but I'd love to see what a Kullervo retelling done today, by somebody else, would look like.

all that to say, I guess, retellings are hugely fascinating - and while I'm not personally into all the current Greek myth retellings, I think it's very interesting what the prevalence of them is saying about the current zeitgeist. (I'm sure some academic's already been on the case, but I don't think these would've been so popular if not for the MeToo movement.)

eta: hello, it's me again, dropping an essay in your comments, again. one day I'll learn to be brief, doesn't look like today is the day.

[windancer]

Most of the recent-ish wave of myth retellings haven't been my cup of tea, even though on paper they seem they should be EXACTLY my cup of tea (as one of the legions of Myth Girls who are now adults with cash to spend on books). I did love Wrath Goddess Sing by Maya Deane, in part because it was a bop (as Greek myths tend to be; amid the violent transformation and suffering is a lot of wackiness and humor) and also because I felt it approached the gods not as sexy, super-powerful humans but as different type of being entirely.

[el_staplador]

I don't read a huge number of retellings, but a couple I'm very fond of are:

The Egerton Hall trilogy (Adèle Géras), which I first encountered in my teens in the school library. These are riffs on Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White, with the three heroines being friends who meet at boarding school as the 1950s gives way to the 1960s, and what I particularly loved about them was the almost palpable sense of setting: beehives and Connie Francis, and the way it echoes the themes of growing up and a suddenly expanding world that are lying dormant in the originals. Plus Watching The Roses has some gorgeous garden writing.

More recently, I really enjoyed Briarley (Aster Glenn Gray) which is a Beauty and the Beast retelling set in World War II, wherein the father (in this book a parson) does the decent thing and goes to live with the Beast himself. It's just lovely, and particularly meaningful to me as featuring a rare examples of a queer Christian character. Not many of them in fiction.

[hunningham]

Here's mine. Red as Blood by Tanith Lee. Short stories, all retellings, or re-imaginings of classic Grimms Fairy Tales. I got the book when I was about 13; and wow I loved it so much. Heavy gothy angst, and it felt very edgy to young me.

There's a retelling of Beauty & the Beast which I loved.

I had had a childhood book of fairy tales with wonderful illustrations and Beauty & and the Beast had a magnificant leonine beast in 18th century court dress, with an embroidered waistcost & lots of lace, but at the end he is transformed into a smooth pink smug, smiling, bread-and-butter prince. Severe disappointment. I felt so sorry for Beauty - falling in love with that magnificant courtly beast and then ending up married to this appalling milksop. Talk about bait-and-switch.

Lee's story fixes that. It was science-fictiony rather than fantasy, and the Beast was some cat-like furred alien.He didn't turn into a handsome prince, he stays an alien. They save the world, or something irrelevant like that, but the beauty / beast romance is what mattered (of course). It's very iddy, big fan-fiction vibes and I loved it so much. The book meant so much to me that I've hung on to my original copy for almost half a century, but I'm reluctant to go back & reread now .. too much time has past.

[lirazel]

I'm late to to the party and McKinley has already been lauded so I'll say: Till We Have Faces. Turning the story of Eros and Psyche into a story about female power and also struggling with the divine was sure a choice, and imo it's Lewis's most successful book.

I'm also a big fan of Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, though I think it's less successful as a retelling than it is as just a fun book about pretentious humanities students enjoying college.