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Roald Dahl

Soon after my seventh birthday, my parents took me as usual to spend Christmas with my grandmother in Norway. And it was over there, while my father and mother and I were driving in icy weather just north of Oslo, that our car skidded off the road and went tumbling down into a rocky ravine. My parents were killed. I was firmly strapped into the back seat and received only a cut on the forehead.

I won't go into the horrors of that terrible afternoon. I still get the shivers when I think about it. I finished up, of course, back in my grandmother's house with her arms around me tight and both of us crying the whole night long.

"What are we going to do now?" I asked her through the tears.

"You will stay here with me," she said, "and I will look after you."

"Aren't I going back to England?"

"No," she said. "I could never do that. Heaven shall take my soul, but Norway shall keep my bones."

The very next day, in order that we might both try to forget our great sadness, my grandmother started telling me stories. She was a wonderful storyteller and I was enthralled by everything she told me. But I didn't become really excited until she got on the subject of witches.....



-Janet Malcolm has observed that it's a good idea to kill off the parents in a kids' book. This allows the kid to have adventures. I particularly enjoy the brisk heartlessness with which Dahl murders the parents in "The Witches" ("just north of Oslo").

MFA programs say SHOW, DON'T TELL, but Dahl very rarely, if ever, follows rules. He tells, tells, tells--and he does so with pleasure. And so we feel pleasure, too. There's something almost campy about: "I still get the shivers when I think about it." Dahl even seems to be winking at us. Is the narrator really being honest--when he has just breezily told us about having been "firmly strapped into the backseat," and having been the recipient of "just a cut on the forehead"--? An attentive child-reader might pause. I love that.

-I also love that Grandma and Narrator indulge in stories about witches "to try to forget our great sadness." This is absurd. It's THE VERY NEXT DAY after the tragedy. But in Dahl's world--as in the world of children--a kind of "dream-logic" applies. (An MFA program might, also, advise you to use elaborate Jamesian dialogue, in which people don't quite say what they mean. But in Dahl's hands, Narrator and Grandma understand each other perfectly, and each says precisely what is on his/her mind. I enjoy this, too.)

-A story happens when I go on a journey. Grandma does not belong to the prim and proper world of Mom and Dad. Grandma is bat-shit crazy: She merrily uproots a small child and speaks of "Norway guarding my bones," and she can coolly notify that same child of the existence of real witches, in the actual world. They're all the more terrifying because they wear human faces, they speak with human kindness, and they wear human clothing. (Dahl, a veteran, may have been thinking about totalitarian rulers, or Nazis, while he wrote.) It doesn't matter that Mom and Dad never talked about witches. We're in a different world now. Grandma has opened her mouth--and *literally everything* she narrates is "wonderful" and "enthralling." And who among us wouldn't choose to continue turning the pages?

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