(Even Anderson dispenses with it in little more than a paragraph.) His adult writing roughs out the smoothness of his edges. Even as we acknowledge his difficulties-he was, as Sam Anderson wrote in New York, in 2010, “ a stereotypical mid-century wealthy imperial Brit-a bullhorn of prejudice and entitlement whose gaffes could be almost touchingly clueless”-we want, it seems, for him to fit a kinder, gentler formula. Writing for adults is not what we think about when we think about Dahl-it does not fit our caricature of him. And yet these stories remain largely overlooked. Here, too, we find the irreverent pleasure in the telling, the attitude of moral justice, the pointedness of the voice. This is not the Dahl of the children’s books, but, at the same time, of course it is. A similar perspective marks Dahl’s final collection, “Switch Bitch,” four longer stories of sexual indiscretion, first published in Playboy. The writing relies on wicked twists: the sickly infant, saved, who grows up to be Adolf Hitler the visitor to a taxidermist’s bed-and-breakfast who discovers, too late, the taste of bitter almonds in his tea. That book was followed, in 1954, by “Kiss, Kiss” and, in 1960, by “Someone Like You,” which together include, among other pieces, ten stories that originally appeared in The New Yorker. The first, “Over to You,” came out in 1946, and features ten not-quite-conventional combat stories, based on his experience as a pilot in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. I can’t help but read this in a different way, however, as if it were a coded reference to Dahl’s four books of adult short stories. “I’ve finished all the children’s books.”ĭahl may as well have been writing about himself: “Matilda” was the last of his children’s books to appear, just two years before his death. “I’m wondering what to read next,” Matilda, another one of his beloved title characters, says, as if to make such an idea explicit. Still, as Dahl also understands, nostalgia only goes so far, for childhood is a passing phase. This suggests something, I think, about why his work for children lingers: a whisper of nostalgia, a bit of history, personal or otherwise. This is among my favorite Dahl books, in part because of the giant’s idiosyncratic language (he likes a drink called “frobscottle,” which causes flatulence, or “whizpopping”) and in part because I used to read it to my daughter, also named Sophie, when she was small.
#Roald dahl short stories analysis windows#
More than two hundred million copies of his books are in print, and they have inspired countless adaptations, most recently the Steven Spielberg film “The BFG,” based on Dahl’s 1982 book of the same name, about an orphan girl named Sophie-bad fortune, complete with adversarial adults and minders, is a staple of his writing for young readers-who, one night, witnesses the BFG, or “big friendly giant,” of the title, blowing dreams into the windows of sleeping children. (This discovery may have had something to do with the role I played in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”: I was the narrator.)ĭahl died, in Oxford, England, in 1990, at the age of seventy-four, and this September marks the centennial of his birth, in Cardiff, Wales. But he made me aware that the narrator, whether third person or first, is not a neutral figure but an active, even directive, force. Put another way, reading Dahl was my introduction to the importance of the teller, the idea that a successful story was less a matter of narrative than of voice-or not less, exactly, for Dahl’s writing is nothing if not plotted. I first encountered the work of Roald Dahl in third grade, by playing a character in a classroom adaptation of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” Not long after that, I read “James and the Giant Peach.” I was not a child who particularly cared for children’s literature, but even as an eight- or nine-year-old I was captivated by the way Dahl’s fantasias took on their own logic, their own momentum, and were driven as much by the flow of language as by the absurdities of plot.