The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More

The stories in this one range from bewildering and I couldn't quite figure out the point of them, to being really memorable. Interestingly, the one I probably enjoyed the most was only one that was probably the most non-fictional, “Lucky Break”. These stories definitely aren't geared towards children as most of Dahl's iconic works are, but feel a bit more like what we would call young adult nowadays, although definitely much more brutal than most YA stuff.

“The Boy Who Talked with Animals” is about a fisherman who hauls up a giant snapping turtle near a Jamaican beach resort. While the guests and fisherman alike are clamouring over how best to kill and consume the turtle, its life is saved by a little boy who claims to have spoken to the turtle and so pressures his parents to pay off the fisherman and hotel manager to save the turtle's life. This one was pretty touching, although I couldn't help feeling a little sad for the boy's parents in the end.

“The Hitch-hiker” didn't feel like it had a proper ending. Our protagonist meets a hitch-hiker who eggs him on to test out the speeds on his new flashy car, but then is caught by a very mean policeman. The hitch-hiker later explains his talent to get them out of a scrape. The story ends on a very strange note, like there is no hint of a resolution and I don't get what the whole point of this story was.

The same can be said for “The Mildenhall Treasure”, which was even less interesting than “The Hitch-hiker” even though it was about people finding buried Roman treasures in a farm. I couldn't quite figure out what was the point of writing this, but apparently it's based on a true story so I'll have to do a bit more research on that one.

“The Swan” was probably one of the most memorable stories of the lot as well, only because it was the most brutal. It dealt a lot with the theme of bullying and I was beginning to wonder why Dahl had a thing for depicting cruelty in children, inflicted both by children and adults. I found this also to be the case in the other Dahl book I just read today, The Witches. In any case, “The Swan” was way worse than that, although I guess I could understand why the ending was left deliberately ambiguous, but also there's a certain sense of melancholy and hopelessness in that ambiguity and that was probably deliberate as well.

“The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” is the cornerstone of the book, and actually probably the most wholesome of the lot. Essentially, it talks about a man who is only motivated by self-interest and greed to embark on a pursuit for a magical talent, but the discipline it required of him to even achieve those talents changed his entire worldview. This was probably the most well-rounded story with a proper conclusion.

“Lucky Break”, as I had mentioned earlier, is really Dahl recounting bits of his life story and how it all led up to his actual lucky break as a writer when he was in America at the tail end of WW2. This was the most absorbing story to me. I hadn't known that Dahl was a fighter pilot, or that he had himself been the victim of bullying and some really brutal treatment (although probably normal at the time) at boarding school, and that probably accounts for the casual violence that his books can sometimes have. Not that, I think, Dahl was a proponent for violence on children, but he seems to have grown up with it as a normal part of life. In any case, it was fascinating to hear about how Dahl had a run-in with C. S. Forester who was generous enough to help him get his first lucky break with a publisher.

“A Piece of Cake” felt like a fever dream, but probably deliberately so. Dahl describes this as a non-fictional account of his own experience when he crash-landed as a fighter pilot, but I've read that there were some details that may have been changed. Nevertheless, it's hard to reconcile this pretty hard-hitting account with all the traumas of being severely injured in war with the children's author that we all know.

Overall, some pretty interesting stories in here but definitely don't expect anything geared towards children in this book.