‘These stories are for the little sleepyheads who are often late for school or nursery. They should be read at the crack of the dawn, in a loud, piercing voice. If your child still doesn’t wake up you can always pour cold water over him or her. I collected these tales in a part of Georgia which is sometimes scorching hot, where the mothers spend their days cooling down water specifically in order to pour it over their children,’ the author writes in the preface to the collection Tales Too Good to Sleep Through. The compilation consists of twenty-six fairy-tales and in the category of best children’s book won the literary prize GALA 2012. The tales presented in the collection are recommended for pre-school and elementary school children. The book has brilliant illustrations by Iakob Gigolashvili. The structure of her fairy stories is based on opposition, inversion and reversal. What is needed to send children to sleep is used to keep them awake, domestic and wild animals change places, a woman wears her clothes back to front so that she can do exceptionally well, etc. The creator of Tales Too Good to Sleep Through explains ‘Suppose this woman didn’t exist; I’ll finish her backwards. Perhaps someone will read it and it will strike everyone in the opposite way.’ Something like a series of pseudo-finales follows: the fairy story seems to end, but as it ends, it is followed by the story of an existing fairytale’s publication and of the protest action made by parents against it. After that an omitted fairy story appears in the text, and after the omitted fairy story we get yet another conclusion… In short, this is no classic fairy story. ‘Sorrow here, joy there; bran here, flour there,’ is how the ending puts goodness and badness, everybody and everything somewhere other than their right place. In their entirety, the non-linear nature of the stories is a part of the contemporary literary experience and, as we see here, such a literary genre is allowed to be as organic, as is a fairy story. One fairy story, entitled Ninika and the Magnetic Clouds, happens in a land which other lands are hostile to, because it can’t always hold out against an enemy attack: this land on every occasion flees somewhere. The author considers that this is very like Georgia.

‘On the whole, Tea Topuria has a very individual way of proceeding, her own logic which she constructs, and everything in it is perfectly correct, yet when you stand back from it, it looks very strange. But if you grasp what is going on, you too will join in the game.’    

L. Liqokeli, poet

‘These stories are so heavily loaded that they really are export stories to be translated. Nevertheless, Georgian details, which characterise us, creep into them.’    

M. Ldokonen, writer

EXTRACT
Translated into English by Natalie Buka Peters and Charlotte Marsden   

TALES TOO GOOD TO SLEEP THROUGH

Once upon a time there lived two sisters in one house - Martha and her sister. Martha was married and she had a lot of children. Martha’s sister was not married. When Martha got up in the morning (I say ‘she got up’ just in the traditional sense; in fact she never slept at all) she would immediately start baking pies. She had a huge stove. On one side of the stove there stood a tea pot; on the other stood food.
That’s about all there is to say about Martha.
As for her sister, I’ve already said, she wasn’t married and she was also rubbish at housework. But she’s the person who made up all these tales I am about to tell you. Like Martha, she also got up at the crack of the dawn, but unlike Martha she slept like a log all night. She got dressed, then she helped her nieces and nephews. She told her stories to the first to get out of bed, but the slowcoaches heard nothing.
Since many mums had children apart from Martha, and many of them were sleepyheads, Martha’s sister went from one house to the next, all day long, waking children up. She had all the children’s names and addresses written on her dress. This was because when parents ran into her in the street, in the shops or on the bus, they used to go up to her and ask her to write down their addresses so she could come and wake up their children. And as Martha’s sister didn’t like carrying a note book or even a handbag (instead of a handbag she usually had a duck, I’ll explain why later), she wrote them on her clothes. And because she wasn’t married, she changed her clothes several times a day. Finally she got so tired of constantly looking for the addresses and telephone numbers on her many dresses and t-shirts that she bought two red dresses and wore them all the time, either one or the other. She needed two, because before she washed one she would copy the addresses into the other.
Martha thought her sister was stubborn and lazy, not that anybody usually asked for Martha’s opinion. But let’s imagine:
‘Martha, what’s your opinion of your sister?’
‘She’s a stubborn, lazy girl. You just only imagine how much time she wastes copying the addresses from one dress into another! An hour! I could bathe three children and bake fifty pies in that time.’ 
Still, why were the dresses red?.. (See PDF)

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