Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #297309 in Books
• Published on: 1994-04-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 816 pages

Synopsis
More than 156 of the great Dane's best-loved fairy tales.

Customer Reviews

Fully Illustrated..?
I purchased this book to read to my two young children but was disappointed when I received it. The text is extremely small and the illustrations are few and far between. The front cover states 'fully illustrated' but this is not the case.

The stories are the ones we all remember but with no colour illustrations and the text being so small it is not suitable for younger children.

An adult edition?
This is a good, sturdy hardback edition, suitable, in my view, mainly for adult readers. The font is tiny, closely spaced, and could intimidate younger readers. The paper is rough and of poor quality; the illustrations are very -- very -- few and far between, black and white, small, and in my opinion, not particularly good. There are also a few punctuation errors, which, while they don't distort the meaning overly, are nonetheless annoying.
Nevertheless, it's good to have Anderson's tales in one durable volume, faithfully translated.

Beautifully embroidered, melancholy tales
Hans Christian Andersen, the famous Danish author, wrote 168 fairy tales and 159 of them are included in this mega-book of his works. They are beautifully embroidered, vastly imaginative stories, with a sweet air of melancholy. They are particularly wonderful to read aloud with lots of lively dialogue that invites the use of funny voices, for those like me given to that sort of parental self-humiliation; talking Christmas trees, grouchy toads, haughty queens and toys with an attitude.

It is ironic that Andersen did not consider his fairy tales very important. He wanted to be a "serious" writer and worked much harder on his real projects; plays, novels, poetry, travel books and autobiographies. Those works are largely forgotten while his fairy tales not only live on, but have permeated our culture. Our thinking and even our speech are peppered with references to his stories. The Ugly Duckling, Thumbelina, The Little Mermaid and The Red Shoes come to mind.

Do be forewarned that not all of the stories have happy endings and some are really terribly sad. Andersen did not have an easy life. His father died when he was eleven and his existence was rather joyless for a long time after that. He left home at fourteen and wandered about trying different lines of work unsuccessfully until finally, after years of struggle and hardship, he was noticed by important people and gained acceptance. Perhaps the darker images in his writings spring from his own difficult years.

Oddly enough, my own children are especially intrigued by the sadder tales. In our time, we shelter children so from any tinge of melancholy. Their interest and the fact that enormous crowds are flocking to see Titanic, an undeniably tragic story, has caused me to wonder if there is a need in the human psyche to tiptoe a bit around the edges of pathos. Hans Christian Andersen's stories are like small beautifully wrapped gifts, but he leaves a few sad little loose ends so they don't always tie up into perfect !packages.