30 Days of Book Talk discussion

Retellings, reinterpretations, responses: what are your favorite books in conversation with other books? Do you enjoy books that do this at all?

While in theory I prefer my plots original, there are quite a few retellings I’ve really enjoyed, generally involving fairy tales and not my favorite books. I'm not much of a fanfiction fan and it seems the less connection I have to the source work, the more I'm inclined to enjoy a retelling. (The couple of Austen retellings I've read were dire, though admittedly, I have not read the previously-discussed Henry and Fanny!) Juliet Marillier and Robin McKinley do a great job of the fairy tale retellings. Some other favorites:

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West: I love this book to pieces, though it is weird and dark and in general I don’t feel like I can recommend it because it is very much not what most people picking up this sort of thing are looking for. It probably helps that I was never particularly attached to the original Oz.

Bitter Greens: A lovely retelling of Rapunzel, intertwined with the story of the 17th century French noblewoman with a dramatic life who was apparently the first person to write this tale down. One of the few divided-timeline books that I loved (helped no doubt by the fact that none of the threads are set in the present!).

The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe: This is a female response to Lovecraft, whom I’ve never read, but I still loved this novella, a well-written quest story featuring a mature protagonist.

I loved The Hours by Michael Cunningham, which is partly inspired on Mrs Dalloway of Virginia Woolf

I love the IDEA of this, but I haven't found too many books that worked for me. I agree with you on the Austen retellings, although there was another that I liked very much Jane of Austin: A Novel of Sweet Tea and Sensibility.

Others that I have tried that were reimagining or prequels or sequels of my favorite novels were so different in tone and style from the originals that I didn't enjoy them and mostly DNFd them.

Examples:

Wide Sargasso Sea - this was meant to be the backstory of the mad wife in the attic from Jane Eyre; but if I hadn't read the description on the book jacket I wouldn't even have guessed that.

Longbourn - Pride and Prejudice from the servants perspective, I found it ugly, dark, humorless, and boring.

Scarlett - Gone with the Wind sequel, I honestly don't remember anything about it but a vague sense of loathing.

PS, while researching this topic I learned that there is a book called "Android Karenina," which I have no desire to read but the title made me 😂

Ange, I agree with you on both Wide Sargasso Sea and Longbourn! I didn’t get Wide Sargasso Sea despite liking Jane Eyre but agreeing the Bertha stuff is really problematic. And Longbourn was a clever idea, but its characters were dull and generic and everything it had to say about how servants were treated as furniture was said in the first chapter.

This type of book is generally not my favorite. I'll second not having a great experience with Wide Sargasso Sea, and a book in a similar vein is March, which follows the father from Little Women at the point where he is gone from that narrative.

Ones I like a little bit more are where the homage work is more light-hearted in nature. The time travel adventure To Say Nothing of the Dog is absolutely in conversation with the book it was inspired by, Three Men in a Boat, so much so that there's a brief part of Connie Willis's novel where her characters encounter the titular Three Men from Jerome K. Jerome's novel. It's more of an incidental connection though, than some of these others.

March was another one I didn't like all that much. At the time I reviewed it I seem to have thought there was some valid reason (other than publicity) for connecting her fairly standard American Civil War novel to Little Women, but at this point I can't remember what I thought it was.

Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe is a good one. A good companion piece to that is The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle, a retelling of Lovecraft's "The Horror at Red Hook". It's especially timely with all the protests and discussions of race going on right now.

Katherine Arden's Winternight Trilogy does some retelling of Russian myths. Catherynne Valente does something similar with Deathless.

Joanne Harris of Chocolat fame has been doing some fairy tale and mythic retellings lately with A Pocketful of Crows, The Blue Salt Road, and The Gospel of Loki.

Another one that does some mixing of the Norse Gods is Wolfsangel by M.D. Lachlan.

I like The Dracula Tape by Fred Saberhagen, wherein Dracula leaves his own record of where Bram Stoker got it horribly wrong. I loved Brittle Innings by Michael Bishop even more, but to say which famous fictional character is lurking in that book is to spoil the book; highly recommended, though.

I read Silverlock by John Myers Myers too long ago to know for sure whether it’s really a 3 star, or a 4 star, book...but if you want a protagonist to meet up with a horde of fictional characters from other novels and legends, while traveling through one Fantasy realm, well then, that’s Silverlock.

I have not read Beowulf yet, but I still enjoyed Grendel by John Gardner. I got right into it.

Finally - I had read some Nameless Detective mysteries by Bill Pronzini, and was an even bigger fan of Collin Wilcox’s detective, Lt. Frank Hastings, so it was fun to watch the authors team and have them meet, in Twospot. But the mystery plot is a bit dated now.

I usually enjoy retellings if they are well-written or if I see that the author adds some of their own ideas instead of just copying everything in the original.

I don't mind all those wannabe-authors coming up with prequels/sequels/retellings of Austen any more, now I simply avoid those unless recommended by some trusted GR Friend.
What I hate though, is when well-known novelists do them and then make a spectacular mess of it. Plenty of bad examples for that, like
- Sense & Sensibility by Joanna Trollope - horrible
- Emma by Alexander McCall Smith (pompous)
-Jane Fairfax by Joan Aiken (OMG, the author got EVERYTHING wrong about Jane and everyone else)
- Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James (boring as hell and the characters are soooo not true to themselves)

Among the Jane Austen retellings I can safely recommend are

- Lions And Liquorice by Kate Fenton. It was published under the title Vanity and Vexation: A Novel of Pride and Prejudice in the US.
It's P&P with a gender twist, first published in 1991 (4 years before the famous BBC series with Colon Firth was made) and it was really entertaining and had some originality to it.

- Unmarriageable Soniah Kamal, a Pakistani P&P in a Muslim/Punjab setting. Delightful.

- Pemberley Ranch written by a male author, set in the US South after the Civil War. It was quite interesting and we get lots of Darcy-pov.

- The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet, though you should check out the videos on youtube as well. Hilarious.

- Northanger Abbey by Val McDermid

After the horrible S&S by Joanna Trollope was published, the excellent JA-scholar, John Mullan, wrote an article in The Guardian, which was great:

Modernising Jane Austen: 10 traps to avoid

Other, non-Austen retellings I enjoyed:

- The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer - it was a total surprise for me, how involved I became with the series and the characters. Great stories and spins on the classic fairytales in a ya/dystopian setting., even though neither genres are close to my heart as a rule.

- The Ugly Stepsister Strikes Back - YA, but highly entertaining and I loved that the author showed us a relationship between the Stepsister Matie and Ella, as positive and supportive.

- Little Women in India - the author had the courage to change the plot in some interesting ways and of course the setting brings lost of changes into it as well.

Oh reading the Austen retellings I forgot the whole Shakespeare retelling series of Canongate; I liked Hagseed of Margaret Atwood, which is a retelling of the Tempest

So, I get the appeal of continuing to experience a work that you loved (that's what fanfiction runs on, which is what most of this stuff is), but the whole notion of "modernizing" Jane Austen seems deeply flawed to me. As the Guardian's list of mores that have changed indicates, these are stories that are deeply rooted in a specific culture. Their plots depend on elements of that culture and class, and also on some pretty major assumptions that the article omits, such as women's inability to make their own living and having to choose between marriage or staying with their families, and everybody's inability to better themselves except through marriage. That just doesn't work in the modern world. So, I get taking elements from Austen to increase the appeal of a book (in any time and place you can write a romance between a snooty man and a witty woman who initially dislikes him), but retelling the whole hog seems doomed to failure. At best, you get a mildly entertaining story that would probably have been a lot better if the author's imagination had had free rein.

But, perhaps one of you will prove me wrong!

Granted, I did enjoy The Lizzie Bennet Diaries on YouTube, but I think it helps that that's a different medium and doesn't take itself too seriously.

I think my answer here is actually The Eyre Affair, which is an alternate history romp featuring our heroine (a Crimean War veteran - book is set in 1984) jumping into the unfinished Jane Eyre.

On the whole I really do not like revisitations of classic or beloved novels.