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A True Blue Idea by Marina Colasanti

2022; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 36; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mat.2022.0043

1536-1802

Theodora Goss,

Themes in Literature Analysis

Reviewed by: A True Blue Idea by Marina Colasanti Theodora Goss (bio) A True Blue Idea. By Marina Colasanti, translated by Adria Frizzi, Wayne State University Press, 2019, 62 pp. I expect wonderful things from the Donald Haase Series in Fairy-Tale Studies, and A True Blue Idea is a wonderful thing: a short collection of fairy tales from Italian-Brazilian writer Marina Colasanti, originally published in Portuguese. The collection includes ten stories, all original rather than retellings of older tales, although they draw on traditional fairy-tale elements. As Colasanti points out in her introduction, “This is a book of fairy tales, with swans, unicorns, and princesses” (1). However, her princesses fall in love with unicorns or turn into swans, rather than marrying princes as we might expect. In “Seven Years and Seven More,” the tale most closely related to the ones we know from Perrault or the Grimms, a princess is put to sleep by her father and fairy godmother, who think the prince she loves is not worthy of her. When the prince finds out, he puts himself to sleep as well, and there they both remain, separately asleep. They dream of each other, but are together only in their dreams. They live happily ever after—dreaming. Most of Colasanti’s tales have similarly ambiguous endings. In the first story, ironically titled “The Last King,” Kubla Khan sails away with the wind— to where, we do not know. In the titular story, “A True Blue Idea,” a king has an idea, the first of his life, and it is so precious to him that he hides it in the Hall of Sleep. There it remains all his life, until he is old and visits it again, only to find that he no longer cares for it. He leaves it there, untouched. In “News and Honey,” a king chooses to hear only good news and finally stops up his ears with honey and beeswax so he will hear only sweetness. These are not the sorts of actions we expect from kings in traditional tales, where the role of kings is generally to marry a heroine or reward a hero. Colasanti’s heroines also have unusual fates. In “Through the Hoop,” a girl is so enchanted by her own embroidery that she travels into it every day, until one day her older sister embroiders her into the canvas, trapping her forever. “Thread by Thread” also features two sisters, the fairies Nemesia and Gloxinia, who collaborate on embroidering a white silk cloak. Jealous of her sister’s work, Gloxinia turns her sister into a spider and completes the embroidery, only to find that she has become trapped in the spider’s web. The story ends with the lovely, frightening sentence, “All over the court, over the halls, over the castle and the gardens, patient Nemesia went on spinning and weaving, oblivious to her sister, forever a prisoner of her silver cocoon” (36). Kings who abdicate their responsibilities, sisters who trap each other in women’s work, love that can never be consummated—these sorts of themes permeate Colasanti’s stories. In her introduction, Colasanti writes, “Perhaps it would have been more convenient and easier to create narratives apt to seduce with their modernity or impress with their everyday realism,” but these tales infuse a modern [End Page 122] sensibility into ancient imagery and form (1). They are very short, only two or three pages not including the illustrations, in the clean, spare, elegant language of a poet—I was not surprised to learn that Colasanti writes poetry as well. However, we must include the illustrations, because they are by the author herself, using a technique that resembles woodcut printing. After “The One and Only,” we see a girl’s face reflected in the fragments of a mirror—the mirror that the princess broke so she could have more friends, each one a reflection of herself. In the middle of “Among the Leaves so Green O,” we see the prince and his men out hunting for the doe princess who will eventually elude him when she decides that she would rather be a doe than a queen. In her afterword, translator...