Oriental Tales: Marguerite Yourcenar: 9780374519971: Amazon.com: Books:
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Marguerite Yourcenar
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Oriental Tales Paperback – October 1, 1986
by Marguerite Yourcenar (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars 11 ratings
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About the Author
Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-87) wrote plays, stories, poems, and novels, including the notable Memoirs of Hadrian. She was the first woman to be elected to the Academie Francaise.
Product details
Paperback: 160 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Second Printing edition (October 1, 1986)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374519978
ISBN-13: 978-0374519971
Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.4 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 8.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Customer Reviews: 4.5 out of 5 stars11 customer ratings
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,018,523 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#16885 in Short Stories (Books)
#13593 in Short Stories Anthologies
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Top Reviews
helen
4.0 out of 5 stars Delightful short storiesReviewed in the United States on January 6, 2015
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
I found these little stories to be delightful and I wish I had more of the author's short stories. They cover a range of subjects and are rather delicate and well done. I would recommend, and I am not usually a short story reader.
4 people found this helpful
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Myriam M.
5.0 out of 5 stars Five StarsReviewed in the United States on August 17, 2018
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
Such a wonderful book. Beautiful, a pleasure for romantics and intellectuals.
One person found this helpful
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RLK
3.0 out of 5 stars Three StarsReviewed in the United States on July 4, 2015
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Disappointing. Not up to the quality of her major works. Memoirs of Hadrian sets an impossible standard to meet...
One person found this helpful
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C. Collins
5.0 out of 5 stars Dark, sexual, violent tales of the Balkans, Greece, China, Japan, and IndiaReviewed in the United States on June 7, 2014
Format: Paperback
It has been many years since I have read Yourcenar and I had forgotten how dark her interpretation of human nature can be. These tales take place in China, Japan, and India but also in Croatia, Serbia, and Greece. One even is located in the Netherlands. So the title is not exactly accurate, but that is of little consequence in comparison to the fine economy of language, the unexpected and startling visual images, and the dark sense of irony and the human condition that permeates her writing.
These works compare to the works of Borges, Italo Calvino, and Isak Dinesen; the three writers whose styles, images, sense of irony, and lack of sentimentality are most akin to the world view of Yourcenar.
Many are presented as folk tales of the Balkans, and like many folk tales, are full of cruelty. Murder, violence, and deceit are evident in many of the tales. The Balkan giant Marko is a primary character in two tales and Yourcenar keeps human sexual desire and behavior front and center in most of the tales.
In the short story, The Last Love of Prince Genji, Yourcenar has craftily written the final chapter of the life of the Japanese Don Juan in a haunting tale of memory and desire. It is a warning tale for reflection and new insights on those whom you have loved and who have loved you may be painful.
Some of the stories come to a quick, concise, almost punch line ending, which is the case with the short story The Sadness of Cornelius Berg, a painter who has seen too much to believe in a benevolent God.
Aphrodissia, The Widow, is an ironic masterpiece, for when the villagers murder the pirate who killed the priest, the tears of the widow are not that revenge has finally been achieved but rather because her secret lover has been killed. Kali Beheaded is less a short story than a metaphysical narrative poem full of incredible images. The Milk of Death is a disturbing tale that reminds us of the cruelty that permeates much of human existence and folk tales.
Don’t expect bunny rabbits and butterflies from this talented writer with the dark vision of Thomas Hobbs.
9 people found this helpful
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Joel Smolinsky
5.0 out of 5 stars Oriental TalesReviewed in the United States on May 15, 2000
Format: Hardcover
If you enjoy finely crafted story telling, exquisite imagery, painterly prose, and highly imaginative explorations of timeless emotional and philosophical themes then this book of short stories is for you.
Comprised of Yourcenar's reinterpretation of folk tales from various cultures, as well as tales of her own imagining, the author herself pointed out in her introduction to the work that the title Oriental Tales is a bit misleading. Settings range from the Orient to Greece, Italy, and India, to name a few.
The themes, however, are universal- lost love, regret, transcendence, redemption, heroism- and the telling is of unparalleled quality. I have re-read this small book at least twice a dozen times and never has it failed to bestow some new gift of understanding or beauty.
28 people found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
4.0 out of 5 stars Response To The Book in FormatReviewed in the United States on November 27, 2001
Format: Paperback
Oriental Tales by Marguerite Yourcenar is a Fantasy Book with many stories (hince oriental TALES). I can't say I have read a book like this one before. The only one that comes to mind are those little children multiple scary storybooks.
The first story is about an old painter and his apprentice. It takes place in old China. They travel abroad to paint landscapes. Later on, their funds were low so Ling, the apprentice, pilfered food from the market. Wang Fo, the painter, and Ling were taken to the Dynasty Emperor that night. Ling was beheaded and Wang Fo painted a magic picture with Ling and sailed into the horizon.
The stories in this book provide great imagery, in part, because the setting took place in old Eurasia. The stories were written in a way I haven't experienced before. They combine many subjects like Heroism and Triumph over bad. But some of these had depressing endings.
"Her tanguishing eyes died out like the reflection of stars in a waterless cistern, and nothing could be seen through the gap except two glassy eye balls that no longer gazed upon the sky." pg 49, an example of a depressing part. The style was hard to follow, but that made it enjoyable.
Out of 5, it is a 4. The book was difficult at first and was translated by Alberto Miguel to English from French. There are complex, symbolic sentences everywhere. If you like books on mystical Asia and books with multiple themes, I suggest you go and get this book.
15 people found this helpful
Aug 19, 2017sologdin rated it liked it
Recommended to sologdin by: Anne Birdsong
Shelves: of-best-sentence-and-moost-solaas
Charming collection of cosmopolitan narratives.
Protagonist of the first story "loved the images of things and not the things themselves" (3), which is immaterialist, I suppose, but nevertheless very cool. This character is called to account for the world being "far less beautiful" than his representations on canvas: "The world is nothing but a mass of muddled colors thrown into the void by an insane painter, and smudged with tears" (13). Perhaps so! That's why we have art objects, of course.
We learn from the second story of "that exquisite euphemism, the smile on the tortured man's lips for whom desire is the sweetest torment" (33).
Third tale draws an equivalence between surrealists, prophets, movie stars, and dictators under the aegis of a "sense of poetry" (39) (that the modern world allegedly lacks--a gross conceit, surely). "Where have I heard tell of a poet who was incapable of loving any woman because in another life he had met Antigone?" (id.). This as part of a text wherein "a building will crumble if one has not taken the precaution of walling into the base a man or woman whose skeleton will support the weighty body of stone until Judgment Day" (40).
Next story involves an intertextuality with Murasaki, involving one who "finally was able to let his soul enter the supreme luxury of possessing nothing" (56).
Greek setting in another involves "a rich man, a reasonable man, who often finds nothing but boredom and emptiness" (74).
Best text is "Our-Lady-of-the-Swallows" (85 ff.), a perfect little pro-henotheist theophany.
Overall very cool, plenty of great observations and skilled turns of phrase.
Recommended for those who want the most beautiful and least true stories imaginable, persons who precede us into one of those paradises for the dead who have acquired some merit, readers whose shadows are imprisoned and who hence die as though suffering from a broken heart.
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Jul 17, 2018Radioread rated it really liked it · review of another edition
M Y witch
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Feb 25, 2014Philippe Malzieu rated it it was amazing
I knew Yourcenar tardily. She lived for a long time in the USA. She had just published "Archives of north" her less famous book and from my point of view the most intimate. This novel/essay on the family memory is facinant. There are several levels analysis, particularly psychanalytical.
Yourcenar is risked with orient. I am always anxious such a project because of risk of kitsch. Nothing like it here. Yourcenar is too a connoisseur of orient to let herself go to orientalism cheap.
She is inspired by tales or local stories. Whether it is for Marko of Balkans or Wang Fo in China. Construction is circular. Cornélius Berg returns directly to Wang Fo. Is this allusion to eternal return, with the snake kundalini which bite its tail.
But this return is a kind of report failure for the occident. Wang Fo runs away himself by his painting. Cornélius Berg has this bitter reflection "God is the painter of the universe… which misfortune that God did not limit himself to the painting of the paysages"
Not exotism, not of Shéérazade, not of heat and light. A language rather cold and a sad conclusion on the impossible bringing together of orient and occident. (less)
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Jan 21, 2016Psychophant rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: historical-fiction, collected-shorts, reviewed, french-edition
This is a collection of short stories written about an imaginary "eastern" past, showing the naive perspective of the inter-war period and by a very young writer.
All of that builds up into a fairy tale feeling, rather than history, and a sense of childish wonder that makes the tales quite enjoyable.
Yourcenar already shows great skill as a storyteller, and was also widely read, so although some of the stories feel straight from a children storybook, she evokes very well the characters, their passions and lives, and if her Balkans are not too close to reality, it is the fault of reality, as the stories are how things should have been.
There are a few stories in the Far East, but most are in the Balkans and Greece. The last one, "La Tristesse de Cornelius Berg", takes place in Haarlem, the Netherlands, and closes the circle with a painter in a pessimist tone, as a contrast to the optimist ending of the first tale, also about a painter, "Comment Wang-Fô fut sauvé". Indeed there is a common thread of melancholy that thickens as time passes, with one killing the hero of one of the previous ones.
Good if you take into account the period they were written but probably naive and predictable for our current sensitivities, I enjoyed also the evocative language. (less)
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Nov 18, 2008Tommy rated it it was ok
The tales weren't extraordinary, but it was a short distraction from some other things I've been reading.
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Oct 12, 2011Angie rated it it was amazing
Recommended to Angie by: Suna
Since reading 'Memoirs of Hadrian' last year and being overwhelmed, I have looked forward to reading more of Marguerite Yourcenar's exquisite writing.
These beautiful short stories come from many continents and far flung origins including Japan, China, Greece, the Balkans, Turkey and others. All contain enigmas of one sort or another which give a pleasing slant on fairy tales mingled with elements of horror and most are laced with eroticism and sensual pleasures which usually lead to the downfall of some flawed human who could not resist the temptation laid before them. Its an enticing mix of tales. All different and all magical.
The tales include an ageing painter who is to be executed because the world is not as perfect as he depicts in his work, a young man who gazes at the Nereids (or sea nymphs) and loses his soul to them, a prince who has been a great lover who becomes a hermit in the mountains but is pursued by the woman who loved him all along (he doesn't see her love until he becomes blind)and many others.
As expected the writing is that of a unique talent:
'He stood on bare feet in the dust, heat, and stale smells of the port, beneath the narrow awning of a small cafe where several customers had let themselves fall on the chairs in the vain hope of protecting themselves from the sun. His old rust-coloured trousers barely reached his ankles, and his pointed anklebones, the tips of his heels, his long grazed, callused soles, his supple toes, all belonged to that race of intelligent feet, accustomed to the constant embrace of the air and the earth, hardened by the roughness of the stones, which in Mediterranean countries still allow a clothed man a little of the freedom of a man who is naked. These were agile feet, so different from the awkward, heavy ones trapped inside northern footwear...The faded blue of his shirt matched the tones of the sky bleached by the summer light; his shoulders and shoulder blades pierced through the tears in the cloth like lean rocks; his longish ears framed his head obliquely like the handles of a Greek vase; undoubtable traces of beauty could still be seen on his wan and vacant face, like the surfacing of an ancient broken statue in a wasteland.'
I have swithered between 4 and 5 stars here mainly because one or two of these were weaker stories however, I would still read them again and take something from them each time (it has put ideas in my head for some drawings from them). As it is after the first impression - it's a fabulously imaginative read.
A thousand thanks to Suna for sending me this tiny but wonderful book. (less)
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Aug 28, 2012John rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: em-português, 2013
A short collection of short tales, told with masterful attention to allegory and scenery, and a wealth of ideas and sights -- worlds built upon by Yourcenar to bring myth and fantasy to reality, through insightful parables where beauty, love and horror walk hand in hand, and weave a hurtful tapestry of ancestral quality. Yourcenar's remarkable wisdom shines through, in both historical and human terms, to provide the reader with a set of very satisfying, very provokative stories on which we can all reflect, from which we can all learn, in which we are all represented. (less)
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