SAMPLE FABLE

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Publisher's Blurb:

The tales of Kalila and Dimna originated almost two thousand years ago. These charming and humorous stories about animals have found their way in one form or another into the folklore of every major culture and tradition. What links the fables is the core message about managing power, wise leadership and the value of true friendship.

In his retelling of Kalila and Dimna, Ramsay Wood deftly knits several oral storytelling traditions into a captivating literary style. This version from all major ancient texts is the first new compendium in English since 1570. Young and old alike will treasure these beautifully illustrated tales.

Latest review

17 Earlier Reviews and Remarks:

1- This fresh creation follows the more than two thousand year old precedent of adapting, collating and arranging the material in any way that suits present purposes. It is contemporary, racy, vigorous, full of zest. It is also very funny. I defy anyone to sit down with it and not finish it at a sitting. Ramsay Wood's own enjoyment in doing the book has made it so enjoyable. - Doris Lessing (from her Introduction) 2- Bidpai is a sage who offers advice to his king, Dabschelim, on the conduct proper to monarchs. This advice comes in the form of stories-within-stories; they are the tales that the clever jackals Kalila and Dimna tell to the lion, the king of the animals, a necklace of fables illustrating human strengths, follies and foibles. "Please remember," says Bidpai, "that here we are dealing with a type of medicine, and not a sweetmeat for your delectation." Ramsay Wood has cast his selection in the form of a novel . . . .his prose is often sophisticated ("Your megalomania appears to be approaching clinical proportions.").... vivid and rapid and often witty....The material is not particularly exotic - but then, nor is morality. "Classics", after all, are supposed to transcend boundaries. - Times Educational Supplement 3- A fluent but misguided and misleading adaptation of one of the world's great narrative classics... Ramsay Wood has conflated.... all the major variants of the Panchatantra, reducing them to a quirky, distracting fragment which is likely to irritate the scholar and confuse the layman.... An unappealing curiosity. - Kirkus 4- Unique retelling... may well jolt literary sensibilities tuned to the solemnity or quaintness of our best known versions of animal fables. - San Francisco Chronicle 5- Pungent and vigorous... a wide range of appeal. - Library Journal 6- Not for young children. - Charleston Evening Post 7- One almost forgets these are animals, speaking and acting. Adults interested in the history of folklore should be joined by children in reading these colourful tales. - Publishers Weekly 8- It is at the source of Spanish literature: no picaresque novels, even no Quixote, without these wise and vigorous, sly and funny tales. They are contemporary: they are eternal.... Today when we need, more than ever, to understand the Muslim nations, Ramsay Wood's fresh recreation of these tales becomes indispensable reading for the West. Indispensable, more than for political, for human, artistic, glad reasons. Wood's superb stories should be set alongside Italo Calvinos' recent retelling of the folk tales of Italy. No higher praise is necessary. - Carlos Fuentes 9- When Ramsay Wood retells a story he makes a proper job of it: not for him those pale imitations of a noble original which is what your average reteller so often palms off on his readers. His style is vigorous, unrepentantly colloquial, and yet - in case your purist's soul by now is shriveling - his text retains a high degree of that bardic dignity proper to the classic fable. As a result these stories come alive in a manner altogether uncommon and very pleasantly bracing. ....And then there are Mr Wood's ironic marginalia: on page 184, for instance, we find Macaulay quoted: "I have never found an orientalist who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arrabia." At that point we have just read of Schanzabeh's downfall and can form our own opinion of the worth of the renowned, but scarcely well-informed, European judgement. - The Times 10- I found [Wood's] writing style frequently awkward and self-conscious in its modernisms. Many of his dialogues are an unhappy blend of elaborate literary phrasing and flippant sit-com exchanges. While Wood intends his witticisms as humorous effects, they are more often merely silly. - The National Storytelling Journal 11- We are blessed awhile with the wonderment of children as we listen to these eternal tales of the human psyche. - The Scotsman 12- Ramsay Wood follows his originals closely, and slips with skill in and out of stories as closely interfolded as the petals of a rose. - Ursula Le Guin (The Washington Post) 13- The Panchatantra, in all its various versions, is one of the most successful of all literary works... Wood has produced a vigorous modern version of Bidpai... overlaid with a racy personal idiom, a witty mixture of archaic grandiloquence, modern slang, and (in some passages) the jargon of sociology, television and local government... his version will certainly be much more attractive to modern readers than the older translations, with their drier narratives and unfamiliar oriental hyperbole. - Times Literary Supplement 14- Crossing linguistic and cultural frontiers, these fables also transcend conventional time-frames. They abound with temporal paradoxes. Ancient letters, locked in a series of smaller and smaller treasure chests by King Houschenk in the past, are addressed to kings of the future. They contain words of advice whose meaning only becomes gradually clear, sometimes after a very big delay. - Roger-Pol Droit (Le Monde) 15- Mr Ramsay Wood... has that authentic Silly Seventies ring.... This is all very Eastern. We have had nothing like it in the West (Side of New York) since back in the Fifties when it was observed of a fond but demented couple that the rocks in his head fit the holes in hers. - Gore Vidal (The New York Review of Books) 16- Delightful. - Spike Milligan 17- Mr Wood, drawing on early additions and translations from Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian and Syriac sources, has very deftly crafted selected fables into a work with a novelistic momentum, a clean modern tone, and warm, beautifully wrought descriptions. It's difficult to write about talking animals without getting cute, but Mr Wood succeeds in making the protagonists into lively, complex individuals who manage, for all their human traits, to retain their distinctive animality .... The best and deepest learning about how to manage the kingdom of the self occurs at the back of the mind while the front of the mind is being skilfully entertained. I hope Mr Wood will bring Bidpai back to tell more tales when the Merciful Physician decides the correct amount of time has passed. - Parabola: The Quarterly of Myth and Meaning

Sample Fable:

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

The Bedbug and the Flea

One day a certain bedbug crawled into the bed of a rich man and his beautiful young wife. That night, while the happy couple slept soundly, this bedbug crept softly and gently over their bodies and sucked small quantities of blood without ever disturbing them. It soon became apparent, however, that the wife's blood had a far superior flavour. Within a week its delicate sweetness captivated the bedbug to the point of addiction: never had he tasted anything like it, and he was convinced that every night, by some extraordinary good fortune, he fed upon a sleeping angel. Life continued thus for happily dazed bedbugs everywhere until one day he met a handsome flea. This flea hopped off the back of one of the rich man's dogs that passed by the bed.

"Ho ho!" he called out when he spied the bedbug hidden between the sheets. "Is this your pitch, then, mate?"

"It is indeed," replied the bedbug, "and a very good one too! And now, Good Sir, what can I do for you?"

"Well, it's like this, you see," begins the flea. "I thought I'd do a bit of exploring, you know - see the world, and stuff like that. So I'm travelling, you see - moving about and so on. And I was wondering, friend, now that I'm here, if you'd be kind enough to put me up for the night? I'd be ever so grateful."

"Why, of course you can stay," says the bedbug. "We'll feast together, too, when the humans come to sleep tonight. If you've been living off dogsbody recently, I think you'll find the young female's blood something rather special. It's a tender blood: sweet, yet with the invigorating whiff of an avenging demiurge about it - if you know what I mean. Devilish stuff, really, I'm sure you'll enjoy it."

"Well, that's very decent of you, mate," says the flea. "Thanks very much."

And so, having quickly made friendly contact, the two insects settle down in the bedclothes for an amicable conversation that seems to pass extremely swiftly, though in fact it lasts several hours. By the time man and wife arrive between the sheets, both flea and bedbug have talked themselves silly and are very hungry. No sooner does the flea sniff the wife's exquisite body odour, her fine muskiness ravishing his senses, then his rear legs twitch convulsively and he inadvertently gives several tiny hops of quivering anticipation.

"Shh!" whispers the bedbug urgently. "We must wait till they fall asleep. Shh!"

"I know! I know!" the flea calls back. "It's just that I'm famished and she smells even better than you said." Yet he manages to control himself somewhat, and soon the couple are asleep.

Bedbug and flea now vigorously assail the delicious wife. But while the bedbug creeps about softly and gently, slipping the needle of his hollow feedtube very carefully into the wife's skin, the flea goes berserk with repeated bites that raise broad spots like pimples as red as a rose. Oh, he bites her ivory thighs and gnaws her milky breasts, he nips her delicate throat and chews her lovely buttocks and so ravenously pretty-plays her sweet carcass with his painful pinches that she wakes and feels with her fingers the awful bumps that now blemish her silky skin.

"Husband, husband," she calls out softly, and gives her snoring spouse a shake awake. "Something has bitten me! Something nasty is in the bed with us!"

"What?" he answers, still half asleep. "Bitten by a nasty bed?"

"No, no," his wife corrects him. "Vermin. Bugs. Insects. Spiders. Lice. I don't know which, but please light the candle quickly. I cannot bear this misery any longer."

Dutifully he lights the candle and calls for the chambermaid to come and help. Moments later the three of them yank back the covers and carefully inspect the bed. At the first glimmer of light, the flea takes four mighty springs and escapes right across the room without being seen. But the bedbug - ah, the bedbug is too slow and is caught skulking under a fold in the sheets.

"Aha," exclaims the husband, as he plucks him up between two fingers. "Here's the culprit, my dear!" he says and thrusts the poor miserable bedbug under his wife's nose.

"Oh! Oh!" she cries out in shock, and bursts into a sudden flood of tears. Her husband hands the bedbug to the chambermaid and reaches over to comfort his wife. "There, there" he says tenderly, and folds her in his arms. "It's all right, now. It's all over, my dear."

Meanwhile none of the humans can hear the bedbug's pitiful pleas of innocence. "It was the flea; it wasn't me! It was the flea; it wasn't me!' he screeches out helplessly from between the maid's two fingers. But his cries are useless, and very soon the maid's sharp fingernails begin to press steadily into both sides of his plump little body until he splits apart in such a revoltingly messy way that it would be disgusting to describe it any further.'