![]() ![]() ![]() “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. 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. ![]()
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