The Bloody Chamber, and Other Stories

To say something positive about these stories, I'll say that Angela Carter wrote exactly what she wanted to write. I really don't think she was trying to make it suitable for a public ; the book just happened to find an audience. I don't belong to that audience, though. I read this for book club and I didn't really enjoy it. The style is horrendously affected, convoluted, wordy, full of references (I hate references), symbols and figures of speech... It is actually closer to poetry and I think that it should be read with that in perspective (unfortunately, I don't like poetry for the same reasons). After a while, I realized that you have to read it aloud for it to make sense and I ended up reading and/or listening to the audiobook at the same time that I read so I could make sense of it (the audiobook is on YouTube for free and I totally recommend checking it out if you have to read this for school). All along I kept thinking "why am I making so much effort to try to understand a story that I already know" ? Because, many of the stories are really very close to the original after all, I don't see the point in making them just more difficult to read. Unfortunately, I missed why this was revolutionary. I didn't find this to be that feminist or subversive, especially for a book published in 1979. The 1960's had all kind of weird subversive books... I especially found the characters to be as shallow as in any other tale, instead of trying to build something new out of them. Meh...