Roald Dahl: Not Just for Kids

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Roald Dahl: Not Just for Kids
I’ve always been enamored by the oddities in life—the strange and unusual yet appealingly humorous. I guess that’s why I’ve always loved the writing of Roald Dahl.
	His fictional novels and short stories for adults are pretty good, and thoroughly amusing—My Uncle Oswald, starring the notorious Oswald who claims he has discovered the world’s most potent aphrodisiac and Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life: The Country Stories of Roald Dahl, where a country rat-catcher looks more like a rat than the rats themselves and even acts like one to catch the critters!
Yet it’s his fiction for children that has captivated me the most. Writing from a child’s point of view allows an author to express things in a way an adult isn’t allowed to – in a candid, innocent, yet all-revealing manner, and no one does it better than Roald Dahl. I was in my twenties when I read my first Roald Dahl book. I’d gone to the library, and before leaving I was having a look in the children’s section (never really grew up!) when a small, thin book caught my attention. It was called The Twits.
What particularly caught my eye was the cover illustration. It was of a very grumpy looking couple; the man had a massive dirty-looking beard with bits in it and the woman had a single eyebrow and a moustache and she appeared to be wielding a walking stick. It captured my heart immediately! I soon found out that the book was full of these beautiful illustrations and that Mr. Twit actually had a bird’s nest in his beard…
That was the beginning of my long and satisfying relationship with Roald Dahl’s stories. I will also be eternally grateful to Quentin Blake for his amazing illustrations. I’m yet to find an illustration that has so much character in it—his illustrations are so sensitive, expressive and funny! Dahl and Blake are two artists who complement each other unconditionally, and their work has never failed to bring a smile to my face.
	Weird, quirky characters and creatures in Dahl’s children’s books will remain with me always. Crazy Mr. Willy Wonka in his world of chocolate; The Witches with their blue spit, itchy scalps and lack of toes; The BFG blowing happy dreams through open windows in the still of the night; Matilda and ‘The Trunchbull;’ James and his peach; the list is endless. Not a single one will fade from my memory.

You don’t have to be a child to enjoy these stories, just someone who is honest, with a good sense of humor, who likes to treat their imagination to something truly out of the ordinary.