A Tale of Two Beauties

   
Once upon a time, which is when many stories seem to occur, I read a book. It was a book I loved, and it was a new take on a classic tale.  The name of that classic tale was Sleeping Beauty.

I loved the book, which I'd gotten out of the library, but promptly forgot the title of the story and who wrote it.  Some time later, I was discussing this book I loved, which I very often did, with my eldest daughter, Ellen (aka The Brine Queen)

Ellen, like I, loved stories where the protagonists were strong, independent women, and my description of a woman who cheated her fate and went on marvelous adventures after switching her curse with another caught her imagination at once.  So we set about looking for the story, doing an internet search with the concepts I remembered from the tale.  

This was several years ago, and the tale she came up with was Beauty, by Sheri S. Tepper.

Ellen would, for years, tell me how much she loved the book I suggested, although for some reason I simply could not recall there being the details she spoke of, and insisted that no, that was NOT the book.  But she insisted it was... and so it went for some time. 

Ellen became very fond of Tepper's stories, and started collecting them, first, just to read, but she loved them so much, she sought out signed first editions, until she had quite a collection of books. After a while, I was so taken by her excitement, that I began to read some of the Tepper novels as well.  I was never as enthusiastic as she was, and found the feminism and environmentalism pretty extreme, a common theme being the necessary extinction of mankind by the Earth/goddess, or the separation of men and women (women being the superior sex). I found most of her work depressing, and while there is something to be said about the cold rationality of her environmentalism, it's to be hoped that genocide isn't the only answer.  

Although I had Ellen's books here since her passing, the books were musty enough that I worried about my breathing reading them.  They've been boxed back up, and hopefully preserved.  With their signatures and notes, they were more looking at books than reading books at this point anyway.  I'll likely send them with her husband Carlos, since he cared so much for her collection, and as time passes, he will either value them himself, or perhaps find value in their sale.  

In the mean time, I saw a copy of Beauty in a thrift store in excellent condition, and, since I'd never read it, decided to do so.

I will not say it is my favorite retelling of Sleeping Beauty, but it is, perhaps, my favorite of the Tepper novels I've read.  Although it suffers from the same pessimism throughout the story, and at times gets bogged down in what in gaming we'd call "grinding" (going through the same boring motions to build up... something... energy, power, whatever) it does eventually come to a reasonable and hopeful conclusion, although one that was entirely predictable from about half way through the book, when we got to the part where the author had to beat into us how horrible human beings were and how good we were at making things that were bad for ourselves, including more of ourselves.  

I've added the book to my library.  And while I'll never be comfortable with Tepper's vision, I certainly can appreciate her specific style and unique viewpoint, and can see those things that Ellen found so incredibly engaging in her writing.  Although, at the same time, I think Ellen was also incredibly blind to the things that were less engaging, like the story where trees took children to solve the over-population problem. She thought that the children had been "transplanted" to other families.  Of course, that doesn't solve the problem, nor were the children seen again. It's pretty clear what happened in that story...

Anyway, now I'm more interested than ever to go BACK to Spindles End, which Ellen has also since read, enjoyed, but for some reason, not with the same level of excitement she had for the Tepper novel.   She always said she was grateful for me introducing her to Sheri S. Tepper's work. I suppose I did, in some way.  Just not intentionally.

In the end, a story telling a story becomes a story in itself, outside, in the "real" world.  I think Ellen would have been amused by that.