Seven Canterbury Tales Retold Improvisations on Chaucer
This book replicates Chaucer's literary classic in all respects. Contemporary pilgrims compete at storytelling while traveling to holy sites, just as Chaucer's pilgrims did en route to Canterbury. Their tales, which range from the comical to the spiritual, improvise on Chaucer's very own, as follows: (1) The Miller's Tale Retold: Nicholas, Absolon, and Alison reprise their comic adventures in 1960's San Francisco, with an earthquake replacing the flood as impending doom. (2) The Wife of Bath's Prologue Retold: The chronicle of her five divorces. The Wife of Bath's Tale Retold: A football player accused of date rape must identify the two attributes women value most in men in order to avoid being expelled from college. (3) The Knight's Tale Retold: In pre-Civil War Missouri and Kansas, Arcita and Palamone, brothers who were separated in adolescence, take opposite sides on the slavery issue and fall in love with the same woman, Emily. (4) The Clerk's Tale Retold: The incestuous abuse of a girl named Griselda, as inadvertently witnessed by her childhood friend. (5) The Nun's Priest's Tale Retold: In this Native American version of Chaucer's animal fable, Chanticleer and Pertelote are reincarnated as beluga whales. The moon, who is angry with Chanticleer because he sings only to the sun, comes to Earth in the guise of a fox to punish the whales. Chanticleer must learn to dive in order to outwit this fox-like monster. A tale of environmental peril, told with humor. (6) The "Recently Rediscovered" Tapestry Maker's Tale Retold: God creates a small miracle to reaffirm a priest's faith in His benevolence. (7) The Pardoner's Tale Retold: Three cronies betray each other in Nazi-occupied Poland. A dark verse novella of the Holocaust, with an uplifting closing scene. All of the tales, like Chaucer's, are told in rhymed couplet narrative verse.
