The central question the book seems to ask is, Where does the power in a simple story actually lie? Which explains why this book on literary theory often veers very sharply into anthropology. He identifies and examines nine basic story forms—legend, saga, myth, riddle, saying, case, memorabile (anecdote), fairy tale, and joke—and traces how these story structures each arise from a universal, timeless human need.* "Myth", for instance, provides answers to questions of existence, like God's division of night and day in The Book of Genesis. "Case" is a way of determining and hashing out societal norms. "Fairy tale" is a way of acknowledging and negating life's injustices. "Joke" is an escape, a way to gain temporary freedom and distance. Fredric Jameson, in his foreword, points out the study's flaws, namely its occasional inexactness and outright guesses. That's seems about right. My quibble's that it feels more like a fantastic start than a definitive point of reference. Still, the book kicks wide open a fairly formidable door—why do we tell the kinds of stories we tell, and why do we tell them in such particular ways? Did it ever occur to you that fairy tales use language that makes the fantasy seem moral and everlasting, and our actual reality seem immoral and disposable? Did you ever notice that wisened sayings such as, "Strike while the iron is hot," are often grammatically idiosyncratic? ("opportunity" and "iron" aren't interchangeable words.) Have you ever wondered why myths are so closely associated with very prominent symbols, "Jacob's ladder" for instance? It may explain why myths are much easier for people to grasp than empirical knowledge, and perhaps why myths can possess such a strong hold on one's mind. So the power of a simple form seems to come from simple, desperate needs—to command, to know, to persuade, to exclude, to conform, to escape, to trust, to endure. In all, you can say the book makes a pretty strong case that we're not nearly the sophisticated creatures we'd like to think we are. And I bet if some shrewd person out there happens to fully understand this, they might be able to do an awful lot of lasting damage. Four stars.

*[From the Translator's Introduction] "The book’s aim is to describe the nine elementary narrative structures underlying, as Jolles thought, all literary production: legend, saga, myth, riddle, saying, case, memorabile, fairy tale, and joke. He viewed these ‘simple forms’ as structuring principles operative in language before their ‘actualization’ in specific legends, sagas, fairy tales, and so on, or as components of more complex narrative types. Jolles construed each simple form as the reflection in language of a particular mode of human engagement with the world: the legend as a response to the human need for ideals of conduct; the saga as an approach to problems of family, blood ties, and inheritance; the myth as a form of cosmological inquiry; the riddle as a matter of social inclusion through sharing of special knowledge; the saying as a way of transmitting folk experience; the case as a form that relates human action to norms and values; the memorabile as a way of representing history in its concrete factuality; the fairy tale as an image of a just world unlike the real one; and the joke as a dissolution of what we find inadequate or reprehensible."