![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() “Norse Mythology” is something a bit different for Gaiman: It’s his rendering of 15 stories from what little remains of the pre-Christian Scandinavian myths that were recorded in and around the 13th century. He occasionally comes off as a self-serious For-I-Am-a-Teller-of-Tales sort, but his storytelling chops have numberless generations of expertise bolstering them. At his best, Gaiman does with folkloric storytelling something like what Bob Dylan does with the blues and folk song tradition: He’s absorbed so much mythology that his own work flows naturally out of it, and his narrative voice is richer for its echoes of the old stories. Almost all of his work, from the “Sandman” comics he wrote in the ‘80s and ‘90s to prose novels such as “American Gods” and children’s books such as “Coraline,” ingeniously fragments and integrates the raw materials of myth into present-day settings and perspectives. No contemporary fiction writer gets more of his power from the mythological tradition than Neil Gaiman. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |