Grrrimm

Karen Duve’s biting tribute to the Brothers Grimm including devious dwarves, ill-bred wolves, disappointed princes and frigid princesses

Karen Duve has always been an avid reader of fairy tales, sagas and tales of chivalry. She is especially fond of the Grimm fairy tales. But much of what happens in these stories contradicts common sense and human experience!

For example, how likely is it that an exceptionally good-looking young woman would run a household for seven middle-aged vertically challenged bachelors without being hit on by any of them? And who actually believes that a real prince would want to spend his life with a woman who’s already lived with seven men? How can it be that an important fairy is uninvited from a baptism simply because there aren’t enough plates? How would things actually turn out if someone were to wake up from a hundred-year nap – covered in thick layers of dust and cobweb? And how does a prince keep fit anyway if he has to wait around a hundred years before he can wake his princess with a kiss?

Karen Duve felt compelled to tell her own versions of these stories, which are filled with everything that distinguishes Duve’s novels: domestic aversion, commitment phobia, bizarre notions of love, father complexes, self-doubt, acts of defiance and inferiority complexes. What results is a series of funny, relentlessly soul-dissecting stories in finest Duve style.

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Serbia: Laguna / Sweden: Epix

  • Publisher: Galiani-Berlin
  • Release: 08.10.2012
  • ISBN: 978-3-86971-064-8
  • 160 Pages
  • Author: Karen Duve
Grrrimm
Karen Duve Grrrimm
Kerstin Ahlrichs
© Kerstin Ahlrichs
Karen Duve

Karen Duve , born in Hamburg in 1961, lives in the Märkische Schweiz area of Brandenburg. She has won numerous awards. Her novels Regenroman (“Rain”), Dies ist kein Liebeslied (“This Is Not a Love Song”), Die entführte Prinzessin (“The Abducted Princess”) and Taxi were bestsellers and have been translated into 14 languages. In 2011, she published Anständig essen. Ein Selbstversuch (“Eating Well”) and, in 2014, the polemic Warum die Sache schiefgeht (“Why Things Go Wrong”). Her novel Macht (published in GB under the title “The Prepper Room”) received the Kassel Literary Prize for Grotesque Humor 2017 and her last novel Fräulein Nettes kurzer Sommer (“Fräulein Nette's Brief Summer”) received the Düsseldorfer Literature Prize 2019. Karen Duve was recently awarded with the Soluthurner Literatur Prize 2019 and the Carl-Amery Literature Prize 2019 for her multifaceted oeuvre.