Home Your account Current issue Archives ... April 26, 2007 The Art of Vengeance Collected Stories by Roald Dahl, with an introduction by Jeremy Treglown Everyman's Library, 848 pp., $30.00 and a relatively small but distinct body of prose fiction for adults: Over to You Someone Like You Kiss Kiss Selected Stories Switch Bitch (1974), and Eight Short Stories (1987). The Collected Stories , with an excellent introduction by Dahl's biographer Jeremy Treglown, is a gathering of forty-eight stories of considerable diversity, ambition, and quality, with settings ranging from Kenya to rural England, London, and New York City and narrative styles ranging from the realistic to the fabulist and surreal. Though a number of Dahl's most engaging stories, particularly in his early career, are cast in a realist mode, his reputation is that of a writer of macabre, blackly jocose tales that read, at their strongest, like artful variants of Grimm's fairy tales; Dahl is of that select society of Saki (the pen name of H.H. Munro), Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark, and Iris Murdoch, satiric moralists who wield the English language like a surgical instrument to flay, dissect, and expose human folly. As a female character says in the ironically titled "My Lady Love, My Dove": "I'm a nasty Though in his fiction for adults as in his books for children Dahl exhibits the flair of a natural storyteller, for whom no bizarre leap of the imagination is unlikely, he seems to have begun writing, at the urging of C.S. Forester, as a consequence of his wartime experiences in the RAF, which included crash-landing in the African desert and participating in highly dangerous air battles during the German invasion of Greece. Such early stories as "An African Story," "Only This," "Someone Like You," and "Death of an Old Old Man" draw memorably on these experiences and suggest that if Dahl had not concentrated on the short-story form and more or less abandoned realism for the showy detonations of plot made popular in his youth by Saki and O. Henry, he might have developed into a very different sort of writer altogether. | |
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