Books: Slightly Fabulous

THE BLUE DOG AND OTHER FABLES FOR THE FRENCH (48 pp.)—Anne Bodarf —Houghton Mtfflln ($2.50).

“Anne wanders in the woods when she is not in school or busy with her studies at home. It is in the woods that she finds the subjects of her stories.” So reports Alice B. Toklas, 81, in introducing her translation of this small volume by Anne Bodart, 17. Anne, whose father is a poet and whose mother is a novelist-playwright, is a striking original. As a fabulist, she is slightly fabulous. From Aesop to Thurber and Disney, fable-spinners have produced tales that come to a point. Hers seldom do. Fragile and handled with care, they give off a mood, or shimmer with poetic refraction. Such sense as they make owes less to reason than to reasons of the heart. Anne’s characters—a sensitive dog that keeps a diary, an old ceiling sighing through its cracks, a frightened magpie that cannot see its reflection—are not mere symbols or human caricatures. Ingeniously animated and realized, they live lives of their own.

Like her elders, Anne sometimes lets the animals get out of hand. Her title story is a well-polished but thin cliche: the blue dog, an outcast, dies happy in the cold because the snow lets him pass for white. But Anne is rarely that gushy, precious or explicit. Indeed, though she sees with a child’s fresh eye, she has a special gift for the macabre. She raises an unlikely chill with the tale of a lady whose poodle comes to tea in a dinner jacket. She turns a trick of perspective to eerie effect by playing out the story of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar with a cast of sewer rats. Her most persistent theme: a lament over man’s inhumanity to beasts. As a thoughtful cat tells a shepherd dog in a message from the realm of the dead: “Beware of death: tell them [those-who-walk-on-two-paws] that the Styx will roll along their white skulls in the infernal regions while the animals on the shores howl with joy.”