Stephen King has rewritten the classic ‘Hansel and Gretel’ taking as a starting point Maurice Sendak’s drawings for an opera on the tale. The result is a narrative in which the American writer acknowledges having taken certain liberties for which he makes no apologies.
The book, published in Spain by Lumen and already in bookstores, is a very interesting result, tells EFE Veronica Fajardo, editor of the illustrated novel and aimed at children from 5 years old, and is that “King’s words are original and fill the sets with life,” he says.
In the introduction to the play, King admits that he was very interested in writing a reinterpretation when he saw Sendak’s images: “Two of them struck me, one was of the wicked witch riding her broomstick with a bag of kidnapped children on her shoulder; the other was the famous little candy house transforming into a horrible face.
According to the editor, “the little house, which looks sweet and smells sweet, suddenly starts to smell of rotten fruits and vegetables”.
“Does it sound terrible, maybe?” says Fajardo, but it’s a suitable read for children ages 5 and up. “They’ll enjoy looking at the illustrations, sometimes tremendous, sometimes luminous, and they’ll enjoy the words and learn that kids can manage on their own to emerge victorious from complicated situations, just like life itself,” he says.
The changes Stephen King makes
King says in the book’s foreword that the essence of the story is that of all fairy tales: “a bright exterior, a dark and terrible center, and brave and resourceful children.”
In a way, acknowledges the famed writer, “I’ve spent much of my life writing about children like Hansel and Gretel.”
And, he says, in the end the result of his reinterpretation is like Sendak’s work: “luminous on the outside and dark on the inside”.
Stephen King is the author of more than seventy books, all of them best sellers, including ‘The Shining’, ‘Animal Cemetery’ or ‘Misery’, works of enormous success, adapted into films and series.
Maurice Sendak was an author and illustrator of children’s books, which have sold more than 50 million copies and have been translated into 40 languages. He was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Prize for Illustration, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Prize from the U.S. Library Association and the first Astrid Lindgren Prize for Children’s Literature, awarded by the Swedish government, reported Agencia EFE.
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