“Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life”, by Roald Dahl

Dahl, Roald. Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life: Stories. New York: Knopf, 1990. Print.

A friend dropped this off for us to read; she had picked Danny the Champion of the World as our next book club book, and thought we’d be interested to read the final short story in this book, which is an early version called simply The Champion of the World.

This is not a children’s book, as my 13-year-old emphatically told me after reading the first story.  The stories usually share the same protagonist, an unnamed man with a friend, Claude, who generally also figures in the stories.  These two grown men often act like adolescents, making it somewhat hard for me to sympathize with them.  Changing The Champion of the World to have a boy as its hero in the book form, rather than Claude, makes a huge shift in my enjoyment of the story, especially as it adds on the whole layer of Danny’s relationship with his father.

These stories have definitely stayed with me.  One story, “Parson’s Pleasure”, I’m almost convinced I read once before, a long time ago.  An antique dealer finds a piece of furniture in a farmhouse, called a commode – which confused me mightily as a child since he seemed to be describing a dresser, where I thought a commode was a piece of furniture that holds a chamber-pot.  There’s a story about a rat catcher, one about racing greyhounds, and the title story about mating cows and bulls.  If you like Roald Dahl and want to explore his other stories, this is fine, but possibly not the right place to start.  His book Skin and other stories got a better rating from the 13-year-old in my house as a transition book from Dahl’s children’s works to adults.