5/27/2023 0 Comments Seven Gothic Tales by Isak DinesenIts culmination reaches in Rounds Round Pisa, where the young Agnese della Gherardesca, dressed as a man, interrupts a deadly duel between the old Prince and Giovanni to tell a tale, for the tale itself is the real protagonist in each story, like it was the lifeline for Scheherazade in “One Thousand and One Nights”. Such a narrative structure is highly complex and challenging for the reader. Set in the 1830s, times of unrest and change in Europe, there is no such thing as a linear timeline or a straight cast of characters in the elliptic shape of stories told in the fashion of Russian Dolls, of stories within stories, disguised identities, androgynous traits that conceal gender and sexuality only the sensuous pleasure of lingering in the act of storytelling in a continuous mirage of distorted fiction. Unlike the former though, Dinesen’s sophisticated, poised prose acts like a charm that transfixes the reader through its receding succession of symbolic patterns that defy the classic boundaries of limiting the tales by beginnings and endings. Dinesen’s world is a dark fairytale, painted with the hues of slowly unveiled fantasy reminiscent of the Grimm Brothers or Edgan Allan Poe’s horror tales.
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