Review: THE CONJURE WOMAN by Charles Waddell Chesnutt

Original Publication Date: 1899

Genre: folk tales

Topics: slavery, antebellum South, magic



















 
Review by heidenkind:

John and Annie are northerners who relocate to North Carolina for Annie's health, and want to invest in some property. The first day looking around their new neighborhood they meet old Uncle Julius McAdoo, a former slave who John enlists for help. Uncle Julius knows everything there is to know about the area, the former plantations, and their owners, and loves to tell stories about what life was like before the Civil War–stories filled with strange happenings and "conjure," a hoodoo kind of magic. John dismisses these tales as ignorant and fanciful, but that doesn't stop Uncle Julius from using them as a metaphor to manipulate John and Annie for his own purposes.

This is a book I would recommend to anyone. First of all, the writing style is super-smart and clever. Charles Waddell Chesnutt definitely had a way with words, and there's an underlying current of humor and intelligence in the narration. Secondly, the stories themselves are simply fascinating. Some of them are comedic; many of them are tragedies. But taken on their own they stand up with the greatest of Aesop's Fables or Grimm's fairy tales. And lastly, The Conjure Woman is book that's not simply a collection of stories–it's about race relations in the South after the Civil War.

Chesnutt was a 19th-century African American journalist who became an influential early member of the NAACP. The Conjure Woman was his first book, and it's cleverly framed by the contemporary (in Chesnutt's time) lives of John and Annie. John's perspective gives the stories context–for example, after "The Gray Wolf's Ha'nt," John suspects Uncle Julius told him this story for the express purpose of keeping a piece of John's property undeveloped. Julius is obviously not afraid to take advantage of the ignorance of his boss, and tries to influence both him and Annie with his tales.

When it comes to Annie, however, one gets the feeling that her view of Uncle Julius is both more realistic and more sympathetic than John's: John sees the antebellum South in a romantic light, whereas Annie can understand the precariousness and harshness of life from Julius' tales.

But the main focus of The Conjure Woman is, of course, Uncle Julius' stories, which are bizarre and terrifying and definitely have the atmosphere of another world. In tone they kind of reminded me of Django Unchained: full of danger, mystery, vengeance, love, dark humor, violence, and the sense that this a place where anything can happen. But that doesn't mean people in the stories are powerless. They have the conjure woman!

I listened to the Librivox recording of The Conjure Woman, and the narrator, James K. White, did an absolutely fantastic job. I can't imagine anyone performing this book better. His accents and voices were absolutely perfect.

I'd definitely recommend The Conjure Woman if you're looking for a classic about the lives of slaves in the US that takes an honest look at race relations in both pre- and post-Civil War America, yet isn't a downer. I'm really happy I decided to give this one a try!



Download The Conjure Woman by Charles Waddell Chesnutt at Project Gutenberg|Librivox

Review: Lady Into Fox by David Garnett

Original Publication Date: 1922

Genre: Fantasy, Folklore

Topics: metamorphism, foxes, animals, love, marriage, loyalty

Review by Chrisbookarama :

Lady Into Fox by David Garnett is a weird little story. When I heard the premise, a lady turns into a fox, I thought that it was just bonkers enough to be worth reading. I thought there would be humourous shenanigans, but what I got from it was so much more.

David Garnett presents the story as a true story, one that he heard from the witnesses of the event.

Newlyweds Richard and Sylvia Tebrick are out for a walk in the woods one day, when Sylvia suddenly turns into a fox, instantly, like one second she's a woman and then BAM! She's a fox. There is no explanation for her change. It just is. The author says there was nothing to indicate that Sylvia would become a fox, although her hair is reddish and her maiden name is Fox. Be careful Jamie Foxx, this could happen to you!

Richard sneaks his foxy wife back into his home. He doesn't want anyone to know about Sylvia's change so he fires the servants and shoots his dogs (luckily he doesn't shoot the servants). At first, Sylvia continues to act like a lady, wanting to be fully clothed and eat at the dining room table, but over time her animal instincts take over and she becomes a fox completely.

Although Sylvia goes through this dramatic metamorphosis, it was Richard's change that affected me most. Of course at first, he's shocked and confused by it. He tries very hard to keep Sylvia from giving into her new animal personality. At times he even scolds her, but eventually he comes to accept what she is becoming. When Sylvia wants to be free, he lets her go, though it breaks his heart and he fears what may happen to her.

Now in cold blood he began to reflect on what he had done and to repent bitterly having set his wife free. He had betrayed her so that now, from his act, she must lead the life of a wild fox for ever, and must undergo all the rigours and hardships of the climate, and all the hazards of a hunted creature.

Richard becomes a misanthrope, he shuns the company of all humans. He only wants his fox-wife to come back to him. In the beginning, he waited for her to return to her human form, but later he doesn't even think of her as the woman she was, he accepts and loves her as she is.

No, all that he grieved for now was his departed vixen. He was haunted all this time not by the memory of a sweet and gentle woman, but by the recollection of an animal; a beast it is true that could sit at table and play piquet when it would, but for all that nothing really but a wild beast.

Richard himself becomes more and more animal-like. He lets his beard grow, becomes filthy, neglects the housekeeping, and spends much of the time in the woods.

All this disorder fed a malignant pleasure in him. For by now he had come to hate his fellow men and was embittered against all human decencies and decorum. 

Richard stays true to his wife, even though the neighbours think he's lost his marbles. They all believe she ran off with someone. One thing I found strange was that even though they think he's crazy, no one considers that maybe he murdered his wife and that's why she disappeared. No one calls the magistrate! I mean, that's the first thing I would think of doing.

Lady Into Fox is actually a beautiful story of love and accepting the people you love as they are. Garnett does a fantastic job of placing the reader into the mind of Richard. All his pain and anguish is real even though the idea of a woman turning into a fox is ridiculous. It seems perfectly acceptable that a man should love a fox. The only problem I had with the novella was the abrupt ending, though I think that is the standard for these kind of stories at the time.



Download Lady Into Fox by David Garnett at Project Gutenberg|Librivox|

Note: I recommend downloading the epub with images. The woodcut illustrations, by Garnett's first wife Rachel Alice, are charming and added so much to my enjoyment of the book.

Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

Original Publication Date:  1904

Genre:  Mystery, Folk Tales 

Topics:  Ghosts, Spirits, Japanese Culture

        
Review:  I spent a lot of time scouring Librivox before settling on Kwaidan.  I was looking for books about non-Western countries that were written in English so that I could add some multi-cultural action to this blog!  I found two books that qualified in my first search, Kwaidan being one of them.  While it's not written by a Japanese author, Lafcadio Hearn did read a lot of Japanese texts and spend a good amount of time in Japan.  He also was a completely fascinating person in his own right.

Kwaidan is a collection of many short stories, fables, and folk tales from Japan.  One of the best parts of reading folk tales is seeing the similarities and differences that exist between cultures.  For example, many folk tales from around the world seem to address the cross-over from living to dead.  In this collection, the story of Hoichi the Earless is the one that most stood out - Hoichi is a blind monk who is a master musician and every evening, he is called to play for a lively lord.  But Hoichi soon learns that he has been led to the graveyard every night and that his life is in great danger unless he can outwit the ghosts that haunt him.

Another story I really enjoyed in this collection was "The Dream of Akinosuke," which reminded me a little bit of The Life of Pi, mainly because readers are brought back to reality near the end of a beautiful and lovely story and are left mystified as to what really happened.

I tend not to remember the details and intricacies of folk tales very well.  I always enjoy the act of reading them, but I don't remember much about them after the fact.  Even now, the stories shared in this collection are fading from my mind.  But they were a treat to read, and the narrators for the stories were good at telling their tales.

One thing that was a little odd about this book was that the last three chapters were not really folk tales - instead, they were about insects (butterflies, ants, and mosquitoes).  Hearn gives some context as to the superstitions around these insects and then goes off into somewhat random tangents on his thoughts about each of them.  I'm sure I would have appreciated this in a book on natural history or science or, well, insects, but in a collection of folk tales, it felt a little out of place.

Overall, though, I am quite happy with this selection - it was fun to read about things that go bump in the night in Japan and listen to stories that were quite foreign to me.