Snow White

my introduction to donald barthelme were his short stories. i learned of this book, dove right in and discovered quite a romp! i feel for the other reviewers that may have felt that this was a faithful rendition of grimm classic. it certainly is not!! it is twisted and thought provoking. my favorite passages are the quiz and the end of part one, and the letter that jane (the evil stepmother) writes to a stranger in the phone book, mr. quistgaard. that truly makes you stop and think about the way things are today and how we insulate ourselves in our own plenum. in a rather strange way, it made me want to do the same thing! i know absolutely nothing about post-modernist literature. i don't even know what it means. what i do know is that barthelme creates and recreates his own personal universe with each story and book. each one unique and provocative. i have read that barthelme is the master. i can believe it.

nice book

EM Forster asked in his famous Aspects of the Novel why can't the novel invent a form less rigid and more suitable to its genius. I agree. So much of what is served up these days to the public is a waste of time and obviously exists simply for commercial purposes. Not Snow White. Here we have real literature with a capital L and here we have real imagination too. Based on the original tale, alert readers will love how a master writer converts the simple to the complex, the silly to the profound, and yet keeps us entertained as he goes. Oh, I know in this democratic era questions of elitism are de trop. But so what? Go ahead and read an elitist book. It won't hurt and you will have a lot of fun in the process.

This is print on demand, and low quality. The ink used did not reach full saturation, and the text is blurry. It’s hard to portray with my phone camera, but it looks very bad.

Being a huge Post-Modern fan, I thought Barthelme would exercise a little more of a central narrative to keep this book from spinning off into a nexus of half-consciousness, character self-reflexivity and general alienation. I did find that the true impetus of the book is in Snow White's hair which proves to be a driving erotic (if broken) symbol for the other characters in the book. The bold printed authoritive text has some nice gleamings of wisdom that remind me of the moral messages of fables, but sometimes seem too obtuse in their lack of connecting tissue between the episodic chapters of the book. I am going to read "The Dead Father" so my brain jury is still out on Barthelme's writing being up my alley.

This novel--although it really shouldn't be called that--is a wonderfully fragmented romp in the mud that is our bloated western culture. Don't go into this expecting an emotionally compelling narrative. While there are characters who do things, I'd hardly describe their actions as "plot," at least in the conventional sense. Moreover, though, I found my attachment to What Happened being continually, purposefully undercut. The moment-to-moment thrill, however, is unmistakable. These were some of the most enjoyable passages (if cynically so) I've encountered in awhile. If you're in the mood for an assertive tour-de-force (which actually does NOT go on for too long at all--precisely because things ARE happening!...plus the book is pretty short, not to mention a quick read), try this one out!

In 1967 the New Yorker devoted nearly an entire issue to publishing Barthelme’s novel Snow White. It is inconceivable that they would do something so peculiar and interesting now. (Just today I saw that the New Yorker plans to offer novellas electronically. Which they clearly wish us to believe is terribly innovative and daring -- or, perhaps 10% as daring as they were 50 years ago.) When I started reading Barthelme a few years ago, the general opinion seemed to be that the stories were what mattered, what held up. I read 60 Stories, then 40 Stories, then read them both again. Hungry to read something fresh, I decided to risk this novel and was a little surprised to find it an absolute lark. Enamoured as I am of Barthelme’s non-stop high stakes language play, I guess I had worried that a novel might be just too much, too exhausting. I wish I’d understood that this novel is actually even more broken up, more fragmentary and poem-like, than most of his stories. You could think of it as a collection of 100 rants, or 100 flash fictions if flash fictions were any good, or a even a book of 100 prose poems, if prose poems got off their high horse, fled brunch, and got smashed. Don B’s brilliant language wizardry is melded to events that are fun and hilarious and somehow just right. What a joy to throw 6-packs of Miller High Life through the windscreen of a man named Fondue! (I assert that the courtroom drama that ensues is my favorite court scene in literature -- though I will admit it is somewhat irregular.) Best of all: let’s poison the prince for once! Yes, please! I shouted. Give Snow White a break! (Or, as she puts it herself, “I myself am so buffeted by recent events and non-events, that if events give me even one more buffet, I will simply explode.”)

This novel is very strange. If you want an interesting read that questions everything and is a seriously messed up parody then this is it. Just beware, this IS NOT A FAIRYTALE!

a free-associative adult/psychedelic nerd-shaman take on the well known fairy tale. if you dig ben marcus, david ohle, pynchon, borges etc, you'll find much to love here.

Barthelme (1931-89) is generally held to be one of Postmodernism's torchbearers (but he's better than that), and to be more adept at short stories than longer forms of fiction (but he's better than that too). 'Snow White' is hardly, you can at least assume, the traditional tale retold. In a series of short chapters the captious heroine is obliquely revealed as a woman regularly pleasured in a shower cubicle by the seven dwarves for whom she performs 'horsewifely' duties; the prince is a fop, and the stepmother is almost an incidental presence in relation to the potently amoral Hogo (one of several 'introduced' characters to the fable). But the characterisation, no more than the narrative, is largely beside the point. The real pleasure of Barthelme's fiction is in the curiously mutating narrative position (large chunks of the story are told by various dwarves) and the flash of succinct sentences that seem to circumscribe an original world view ("...those girls who, right this minute, are trying to find the right typewriter, in the correct building"). This is quite an early book (1967) and perhaps more playful than his later pieces. Intelligent and excellent, it harbours no designs to change your life: that, after all, would be altogether TOO uncool...

The cover and printings inside look worse than a xerox-copy from the seventies. You can count the pixels in the capitals, and the ink is a kind of light-grey instead of black. It says 'Printed in Great Britain by Amazon.co.uk, Ltd.' I hope they still have their day-jobs. The cover has had various illustrations over the years, this is the most awful 'design'. This is seriously the worst printing I've ever come across. Still, a humorous 60's rework of an old fairy-tale. Nice read (if you can get past how horrible it looks).

The only good thing about this book is that it was so bad to read that I became interested in the author and the idea of post-modern writing and researched it but the reading experience was horrendous!

Nicht besonders spannend und der Erzählstil ist recht fragwürdig.