Snow White, Donald Barthelme Snow White is a post-modernist novel by author Donald Barthelme published in 1967 by Atheneum Books. The book inverts the fairy tale of the same name by highlighting the form by discussing the different expectations and compromises the characters make to survive in their world. This is done through Barthelme's fragmentary rhetoric and discourse, by shifting perspectives from the seven "dwarves" or Snow White herself, as well as the wicked step-mother, "Jane." It was

Prior to a month ago, Donald Barthelme was another treasure hidden in plain sight at my local bookstore. It wasn't until I read the excellent book of Charles Baxter essays "Burning Down the House" that I learned about Barthelme. Baxter devotes an entire essay in the book extolling the virtues of this writer upon his death in 1991. Given my love of Baxter, his well written homage to Barthelme sent me directly to the bookstore to pick-up a couple of his books.Ben Marcus (especially "The Age of Wir...

Snow White by Donald BarthelmeI chose this book because I like when authors do different things and twist stories and make their own interpretations that involve anything and everything with Disney.It was hard to read at first. It started off a little weird and confusing and I didn’t know what was going on at first. I actually had to read the beginning a few times so I could understand who most of the characters were and what their purpose was. I finally understand what Donald was trying to do i...

Touch-point for many post-modernist tendancies run to extremes in a kind of flippant, amusing fake erotica (the totally absurd Bantam mass market paperback cover is a kind of a deception, although, granted, it's also literally a scene in the story. The counterpoint of annoyance this book sometimes generates centers around its being a little frivolous perhaps, and I admit that I can't necessarily pull together a cohesive thematic design here. But as a series of clever episodes, self-reflexive exp...

If you've never read Barthelme you've never read. Thats all there is to say.

(a whooshing sound as this book flies utterly and completely over my head)

UPDATED REVIEW 3/2022So this book literally fell off of my bookshelf the other day when I was moving things around. I thought to myself That cover! It had been a while since I first read this, circa 1990, I'm old. Then I remembered a non-review I posted here, circa 2011, basically copy-and-pasting a conversation I had with the infamous karen, probably from one of her own review threads. So I took a look at that un-review. I laughed. So I decided to reread the book itself after all those years. I...

3/7/20: I'm trying to imagine a time when someone might have casually picked up this piece of writing and been moved/inspired/amused. There's nothing to grasp onto here other than an intellectual, jargon-filled exercise. The cover I chose pretty much tells you everything you need to know. And worst is that I feel like a kill-joy for not having been a good sport about it. (I hardly ever give a book one star. But anything else would have been a lie. And there are too many lies going around these d...

Barthelme's post-modern "retelling" of Snow White, in which Snow White lives with 7 men who clean buildings for a living and tend vats of chinese food, was pretty good. Somehow it manages to be quite dated in that way that Sixties experimental fiction can be, and still feel quite modern. I liked the bit when Snow White hangs her hair from the window and two passing old men see it and one of them says "Seems like some hair comin' outa that window there."

This was published in 1967, around the time of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and was considered to be the literary acme of hip swingingness. Dig the crazy Life review – Life magazine, that citadel of the avant-garde, right? Snow White has everything, including William Burroughs cut-ups, words posing as paintings, ribald social commentary, crazy aesthetic experiments, and comedy that smashes.The cover of the Bantan paperback (it came out around the time of the White Album) is flat-out bri...

Much of this novel went straight over my head - my problem, not the book's - but Barthelme's Snow White is such a reflection of the era of its creation that, as time goes by, the wordplay and allusions have become increasingly obscure. At publication, the writing must have seemed intensely colorful, and often sharply funny. I would gladly read an annotated edition.From what I could absorb, this book transplants Snow White and her associated characters into a post-Freudian, post-Jungian world --

While nowhere near the level of The Dead Father or The King (yet considerably more to my taste than Paradise), this book is full of amazing fragments that add up to a puzzling book. The parts are greater than the whole. Go into thinking of it as loosely related bits of poetry and flash fiction and you'll probably enjoy it more.

Remember me? A few months back, I freaked out about how great Donald is? Well, honeymoon's over, as it appears we are now having our first fight. Not that I'm totally unwilling to support his decision to do whatever it is he has decided to do here (don't ask me to explain), it's just that the way he's doing it is like fingernails on a chalkboard and I swear to god, mom, I could just kill him right now, kill him dead forever and ever, I could take out a life insurance policy and then pay some bik...

Intellectual masturbation at its finest, big dirty postmodern splurges of absolutely no value altogether.

My copy is a Bantam paperback from 1971 featuring on its cover Snow White's naked arse and seven arms reaching out from behind a shower curtain. The blurb on the back mentions "the crisis in literature." This read in a lot of ways like a period piece in form and content. Deconstruction of the fables, or a fable of the deconstruction, ye olde feminist paradigm subversion, with syntax obviously influenced in Borgesian fashion by George Saunders and early McSweeneys.net. It is always lacking in con...

I recently watched the movie Mirror, Mirror. [Don’t do it.] I did it because I had recently re-dipped my toe into the river Coover, Briar Rose being the immediate shallows, and all his messing around with our treasured fables and fairytales. I was tempted to check in with the worlds of Disney and Hollywood and ETC to see how much of this stuff they still get wrong. Let me tell you. It’s still wrong. And now it’s worse because they’ve learned all the wrong lessons about irony which have been beat...

Caveat before the review: I am not sure that I "get" this book. Amazon has this seemingly simple explanation for the book: "An inventive, satiric modern retelling of the classic fairy tale provides an incisive and biting commentary on the absurdities and complexities of modern life." I agree, sort of. You see, SNOW WHITE is most certainly a postmodern novel. The hi-jinks Barthelme includes within the novel are sometimes maddening, playful, and inventive for sure...but...there is always a but...I...

This is my favorite novella. When I first read this book, in my early 20s, I identified with Snow White, because I felt like the men I was meeting were metaphorically dwarves, lacking in dimension. I adored Donald Barthelme's ironic, collage-like writing style, which was very much like my own. In fact, discovering his writing veered me away from becoming a fiction writer, as I felt that my writing voice had already been taken, by him. He was older than me and had been living and writing for long...

I'm quite sure I'll never finish this little monster. It's like someone else's horribly behaved twelve-year-old you really want to smack around or throw down the stairs, but you know you'll never get away with it so you just grit your teeth and try to endure its squeaky voice, bad jokes and completely misplaced superior attitude. I guess I just don't get the appeal of this kind of literature. I think at this point we should be beyond the "its edgy and risqué to re-tell a fairy tale, modernise it...

Probably not the best place to start if you want to read some Barthelme. Start with some of the short stories.Got lost a couple of times. I think a couple of pages are just random assemblages of cut up phrases. Some of the behavior of various characters is more than a bit odd as well. But what is going on here is nowhere near as obtuse as some would have you believe. What would happen if you took a fairy tale, contemporized it and turned the archtypes into living people? That's what this book tr...