Five titles to meet the controversial Roald Dahl

After becoming known as the author of children’s stories in 1943 with ‘The Gremlins’ (a Walt Disney commission only distantly related to Joe Dante’s popular 1984 film), Dahl took his time before returning to the genre. He did it in 1961 with the novel ‘James and the Giant Peach’, which recounts the amazing and somewhat macabre story of an orphan boy (His parents were eaten by a rhinoceros that escaped from London Zoo) who is left under the guardianship of two very evil aunts and who ends up inside a giant peach, where he lives a series of most surreal adventures in the company of some insects. talking giants. Probably if it had been published a few years later she would have been received as the first chronicle of an acid trip aimed at children. In 1996, Henry Selick directed a more than competent film adaptation produced by Tim Burton.

Taking inspiration from the rivalry between Cadbury and Rowntree, the two candy and chocolate companies that shared the lion’s share of the market during his childhood years, Dahl created this story about a boy from a very poor family who gets an invitation to visit the factory of the eccentric Willy Wonkaa wonderful chocolate emporium that works thanks to the work of tiny beings called Oompa-Loompas. In the first edition of the book, the Oompa-Loompas were described as african pygmies, prompting some critics to highlight the problematic parallels between factory work and slavery. Dahl agreed to publish a new revised edition in which the Oompa-Loompas became some kind of dwarf hippies from Loompaland. Mel Stuart, in 1971, and Tim Burton, in 2005, brought the novel to the cinema with notable success.

Submissive wives who give free rein to all the accumulated resentment, humiliated men who plan their revenge, mocked mockers, guys who fight their existential emptiness with crazy bets… Raold Dahl deploys his wicked wit and macabre sense of humor in 16 short stories that have appeared over more than two decades in various publications. Three of the stories had been adapted for the small screen in as many episodes of ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents’ (one of them, ‘Man from the South’, was recreated by Quentin Tarantino in the movie ‘Four rooms’), and the publication of the book gave rise to a television series with the same title ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ . Despite the heterogeneous origin of the texts, it is the author’s most popular volume for adults.

An English boy and his Norwegian grandmother (a character based on the author’s mother) confront a society of child hating witches holding a convention at a luxury hotel in Bournemouth. Slightly more complex in structure than Dahl’s other children’s works, ‘The Witches’ offers a new burst of twisted charm and overflowing imagination and benefits from some splendid illustrations by Quentin Blake, but has often been the target of accusations of excessive cruelty and rampant misogyny. In 1990, director Nicolas Roeg brought ‘The Witches’ to the cinema in an adaptation that changed the ending of the story and that Roald Dahl described as “absolutely appalling & rdquor ;. The death of the writer that same year deprived us of knowing his opinion on the version that Robert Zemeckis directed for HBO Max in 2020.

Already from the simplicity of the title, Roald Dahl’s fourteenth novel for children announced its uniqueness within the bubbling bibliography of its author. Trading the supernatural threats of previous titles for no less frightening domestic conflicts‘Matilda’ tells the story of a highly intelligent girl who is very fond of reading who makes use of her telekinetic powers to face the indifference of pitiful parents and to the perfidy of a school director who tyrannizes her own niece. Beautifully illustrated by Quentin Blake, the novel quickly rose to the top of lists of the best children’s books of all time. From the film directed by Danny DeVito in 1996 and the musical created in 2010 by Denis Kelly and Tim Minchin, it must be said that they do justice to the virtues of the original text.