This number is all the more striking because Dahl did not write an extended series, which is often the key to mega-success as a children’s writer. Around the world, more than ten million copies of his books sold last year. In a 2000 survey, British readers named him their favorite author. “There are the books!”ĭahl, whose first book for children, “The Gremlins,” was published in 1943, and whose last, “The Minpins,” was published posthumously, in 1991, has been astonishingly popular for nearly half a century. (Now hard and surprisingly heavy, the wad resembles a small cannonball.) Still, what seemed to excite the children the most was the paperback collection of Dahl’s own work. Several young visitors asked for permission to hold the ball of chocolate-bar wrappers that Dahl had made as a young man he scrunched a new one into the ball each day, after eating his habitual lunchtime treat. “Has it got blood on it?” another asked hopefully.
“It makes a good letter opener,” one little boy said of the prosthetic hip. Next to the jar was a waxy-looking knob that turned out to be Dahl’s hip bone, along with a titanium replacement. And they loved that he kept, on a side table, a jar containing gristly bits of his own spine, which had been removed during an operation on his lower back. They liked the fact that Dahl, unsatisfied with desks, had designed a baize-covered writing board, to balance on his lap just so. But the kids saw more possibilities in a musty old hut of one’s own. “You’d expect it to be grander,” one woman said. The walls, lined with Styrofoam, were stained sepia from all the cigarettes Dahl smoked there was a grotty wing chair and wires for a jury-rigged heating system dangled from the ceiling. The adults who looked into the hut were less impressed. Many of the kids peered inside the writing hut-they weren’t allowed in-and seemed to discover there further evidence that Dahl was a strangely sympathetic adult who shared a preoccupation with candy, a clinical fascination with the body, and a love of ingenious, self-devised schemes. The appointed day was hot and bright, with a clear sky that Dahl would have described as “milky blue.” The girls wore sherbet-colored canvas hats the boys, their pale legs poking out of shorts, looked destined for sunburns. There are games-Splat the Rat and Guess the Number of Sweeties in the Jar-and tea, cakes, and orange squash for sale. Dahl died in 1990, at the age of seventy-four, but one day a year his widow, Felicity, invites children to the estate where he lived, in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, and local families swarm in like guests at Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. He called it the “writing hut,” and, since Dahl was nearly six feet six, he must have inhabited it like a giant in an elf’s house.
Roald Dahl, the British author of children’s books, wrote in a tiny cottage at the end of a trellised pathway canopied with twisting linden trees.
0 kommentar(er)
