Stories from the Pentamerone — Reading Notes

The Frame Tale's Layered Voice

The opening story, 'How the Tales Came to Be Told,' introduces a narrator who is both moralizing and mischievous. The first sentence—'It is an old saying, that he who seeks what he should not, finds what he would not'—establishes a sententious tone, but the follow-up about the ape 'trying to pull on his boots' undercuts it with absurdity. This double voice persists: the narrator describes the princess Zoza as 'grave and demure, and looking as sour as vinegar,' mixing formal diction with a homely simile. The frame also uses repetition for rhythmic effect: the king tries 'first one thing and then another' to make Zoza laugh, listing performers in a breathless catalogue. The prose moves from expansive description to terse action—'So the fountain was made'—creating a syncopated pace that mirrors the folk tradition of oral storytelling.

Corvetto: Speed and Sudden Violence

The tale of Corvetto exemplifies the collection's abrupt shifts in pace and register. Corvetto is introduced as a servant who 'instantly set out heels over head'—a phrase that compresses motion into a single image. The narrative lingers on the ogre's palace with elaborate detail: 'courtyards, porticoes, colonnades, balconies, and spiral chimneys' built with 'marvellous architecture.' Yet this leisurely description is followed by a swift, brutal scene: Corvetto 'struck the ogress on the neck, and made her fall to the ground like a pear.' The simile is domestic and violent, typical of Basile's style. The pace accelerates again as Corvetto digs a pit, hides, and stones the ogre and his kinsfolk to death. The tale ends with a moral couplet—'The punishment of ill deeds past, / Though long delay'd, yet comes at last'—which contrasts with the preceding mayhem, reinforcing the narrator's didactic frame.

The Booby and the Limits of Knowledge

'The Booby' opens with a proposition: 'An ignorant man who associates with clever people has always been more praised than a wise man who keeps the company of fools.' The narrator then introduces a son 'so idle and good-for-nothing that he could not tell a bean from a cucumber.' This hyperbole is typical of Basile's characterization, which relies on extreme traits rather than psychological depth. The prose here is more direct and less ornamented than in other tales, with shorter sentences and fewer similes. The pace is steady, building toward a moral lesson. The excerpt breaks off before the story's resolution, but the opening suggests a pattern: the booby's ignorance will lead to comic or disastrous consequences. Basile uses such figures to explore the gap between appearance and reality, often with a wry, detached tone that keeps the reader at a critical distance.

Readers approaching Stories from the Pentamerone should attend to the interplay between the frame narrator's moralizing and the tales' raw, often violent action. Basile's prose rewards attention to its rhythms: the long, cataloguing sentences that suddenly snap into terse violence, the proverbs that both explain and undercut the events. The collection is best read not as a unified work but as a series of experiments in voice and pace, where each tale recalibrates the relationship between storyteller and listener.

There’s something oddly tender about Basile’s fussy moral verses tucked inside such wild tales—like finding a quiet room in a noisy house. Around the same centuries, Warriors of Old Japan, and Other Stories — Reading Companion carries that same patient, wondering pause between battles. I think of both books as old friends who never rush their endings, and that’s enough.