KISS KISS, a collection of Roald Dahl stories

KISS KISS: Eleven Fine New Stories
ROALD DAHL
Penguin Books
Various prices; out of print in the US

The Publisher Says: In 1953 the publication of an unusual volume of stories called SOMEONE LIKE YOU was greeted by The New York Times Book Review with these words:
"At disconcertingly long intervals, the compleat short story writer comes along who knows how to blend and season four notable talents: an antic imagination, an eye for the anecdotal predicament with a twist at the end, a savage sense of humor suitable for stabbing or cutting, and an economical, precise writing style. No worshiper of Chekhov, he. You'll find him marching with solid plotters like Saki and O. Henry, Maupassant and Maugham. ... The reader looking for sweetness, light, and subtle characterization will have to try another address. Tension is his business; give him a surprise denouement, and he'll give you a story leading up to it. His name in this instance is Roald Dahl."

In KISS KISS, Roald Dahl has collected eleven new stories every bit as entertaining as the now famous "Taste," "Lamb to the Slaughter," "Skin," and the other stories that made SOMEONE LIKE YOU so memorable.

Actually, ever since his stories first appeared in the United States, people have been retelling each other, in club cars and at dinner parties, Roald Dahl's sometimes shocking and always unpredictable plots. The stories in KISS KISS are no less haunting and no less brilliantly told. We guarantee you'll be dining out on "Royal Jelly," "Parson's Pleasure," "The Landlady," "Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel's Coat," and the others, for a long time to come.

THIS BOOK WAS BORROWED THROUGH MY LOCAL LIBRARY'S I.L.L. PROGRAM. THANK YOU!

My Review: A cruel and demanding husband, or so his first wife Patricia Neal would have us know; a creepy old party, as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory amply demonstrated, with a great deal of disdain for Jewishness and gluttony and greed in general. His adult fiction is largely out of print in the US, and he was never really quite The Thing here as he was in Britain. I suppose his light sneers at us, so evident in his attitude towards the US's involvement in the Second World War, prevented his eventual literary rise from gaining the same boost as it did among the countrymen who saw, heard, absorbed his flying prowess and spying nous.

I decided to read this collection for some reason or another (maybe it was the 1960 Edgar-winning story?), I can't honestly recall why now. I know that I began to regret my decision as early as "William and Mary," the second story, wherein this is from the text of a letter written by Dahl as coming from beyond the grave of a man to his newly-widowed wife of thirty years:

"He is a magnificent neurosurgeon, one of the finest, and recently he has been kind enough to let me study the results of some of his work, especially the varying effects of prefrontal lobotomies upon different types of psychopath."

And then he goes on to give orders like "don't get a TV" and "disconnect the phone because I don't need it anymore"! How appalling. Sixty years ago, when this collection was published, that wasn't, whole and entire, a horrendous thing to say? I'd say it was, but I was a babe in arms at the time and have no direct knowledge of the way it would sound to the era's denizens. I suspect it wouldn't have raised an eyebrow on either of my parents, but they were right wingnuts and often didn't hear things that made, and make, my skin crawl.

At any rate, I deploy the Bryce Method and report my ideas, lightly smoothed out or plucked and shaved, story by story:

The Landlady is a shivery psychological horror story. It's obvious, but it's obvious dressed in its Sunday best with a lovely Easter bonnet on it. Poor Mr. Wilkins...Weaver! Heh, Weaver. Only seventeen, but I'll bet he was as unblemished as the twenty-eight-year-old Mr. Temple. I was really pleased to make the landlady's acquaintance.

This story won the 1960 Edgar Allan Poe Award for short fiction, and I certainly see why.

William and Mary is exactly like I imagine meeting Dahl would have been in life: A thoroughly awful man stomping on a wishy-washy woman; suddenly, in a bizarre twist, he's at her complete mercy; the horrors of his past are about to be visited on him. I'm NOT sorry, William; I AM surprised, Dahl, that you knew you were awful but kept on being like that. People always surprise & disappoint simultaneously.

The Way Up to Heaven is another story of refined cruelty getting its comeuppance. Not very well thought out, this collection, two of these stories back-to-back. The wife avenging herself on the horribly controlling man she's spent so many years serving is shown so carefully to be making a choice, to be thinking through the pettiness of her debasement, and deciding to stop it now, that I could not but cheer her on. Probably my second-favorite story in the collection for her hard-won celebration of her freedom.

"It was nothing much–just a tiny vellicating muscle in the corner of the left eye, like a secret wink–but the annoying thing was that it refused to disappear..."

1) vellicate. transitive verb. 1 : to twitch; to cause to twitch. Love, love, love this new-to-me word.
2) The w-bomb stinks even here.

Parson's Pleasure elevates the comeuppance of a venal little grifter to a National Tragedy.

"We're just in time!" Rummins called out. "Here he comes!"

Chilling. Proof that Dahl understood horror, had the touch of a master with it; leave before you can say too much and be invited back, as the old, old advice goes.

Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel's Coat is a yucky, misogynistic piece of merde that opens with a meditation on how women own most of the wealth in the US via death and divorce; continues with a shabby little deception to hide a wife's affair; then ends with the unfaithful wife forced to lose her lusted-after mink coat to her husband's secretary/mistress. Terribly funny in 1959, I'm sure. (Not.)

Royal Jelly brings into the unsuspecting world a new & frightening reality, a "Rosemary's Queen Larva" via Mabel & Albert Taylor's happy home.

A deeply unsettling story, well told, with all the right eerie beats. Unquestionably the best story in this collection, hands down.

Georgy Porgy doesn't suffer from the disconnectedness inherent in third-person narration, that's for sure. The Vicar was traumatized by the birth & subsequent cannibalistic end of a baby rabbit when he was a child; now he narrates his middle-aged celibate's determination to avoid the snares of his lustful female parishioners. Funny how hard they work to get him to see them as desirable; Miss Roach most signally succeeds in "luring him to his doom" as it were.

We see the fallacy; the outcome is inevitable. George, you bad, bad boy.

Genesis and Catastrophe: A True Story is one story of Dahl's I've read before. UGH but not for him, just the subject matter. One family's blessing is another's horror story. You'll recognize the plot instantly from:

"He must live, Alois. He must, he must...Oh God, be merciful unto him now..."

No child was more welcome than Adolf was to Klara.

Edward the Conqueror I hate cats but I think this story's gawdawful, egregiously cruel, without any shred of the author's "waggishness" as it was intended to exemplify. I hope Louisa gets a swift, condign revenge on the jackanapes. Animal cruelty, even to an animal I do not like, is not funny or clever or remotely acceptable.

This is another refined-marital-cruelty story. I think Dahl's taste for these is telling.

Pig is the rather prosaic title of a cautionary tale meant to scare parents into allowing their progeny to live in the world instead of apart from it. What would Dahl say of today's youth? Nothing kind or supportive! Lexington's fate is the one that I strongly suspect he would wish on our technoworld's abundant crop of Candidely naïfs: Slaughtered for their meat & fat.

Champion of the World does the same as did "Pig" only this time with animals being poached instead of kids being coddled. Trying to cheat the system without understanding *why* is a damn fool's game; doing it for a scumbag too lazy or scared to do it himself? "You're a special kind of stupid, aren't you?" says the meme.

***
And with this mordant but unamusing tale, Dahl leaves my readerly ken for. fucking. ever. No more. No! I refuse. I liked three of the eleven stories enough to be glad that I'd read them, and recognized one story from my long-ago high-school read of it in an anthology I had to buy for school, but that's just not enough for me to want to know more about what went on in Roald Dahl's head.

REMARKABLE CREATURES, two women of science in 19th century Dorset

REMARKABLE CREATURES
TRACY CHEVALIER
Penguin Books
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: A voyage of discoveries, a meeting of two remarkable women, and extraordinary time and place enrich bestselling author Tracy Chevalier's enthralling new novel

From the moment she's struck by lightning as a baby, it is clear that Mary Anning is marked for greatness. On the windswept, fossil-strewn beaches of the English coast, she learns that she has "the eye"—and finds what no one else can see. When Mary uncovers an unusual fossilized skeleton in the cliffs near her home, she sets the religious fathers on edge, the townspeople to vicious gossip, and the scientific world alight. In an arena dominated by men, however, Mary is barred from the academic community; as a young woman with unusual interests she is suspected of sinful behavior. Nature is a threat, throwing bitter, cold storms and landslips at her. And when she falls in love, it is with an impossible man.

Luckily, Mary finds an unlikely champion in prickly Elizabeth Philpot, a recent exile from London, who also loves scouring the beaches. Their relationship strikes a delicate balance between fierce loyalty, mutual appreciation, and barely suppressed envy. Ultimately, in the struggle to be recognized in the wider world, Mary and Elizabeth discover that friendship is their greatest ally. 

Remarkable Creatures is a stunning novel of how one woman's gift transcends class and social prejudice to lead to some of the most important discoveries of the nineteenth century. Above all, is it a revealing portrait of the intricate and resilient nature of female friendship.


My Review: A middling book about interesting times and people. Not extraordinarily well, or poorly, written. Not unusual or original in plotting or in, frankly, any way I can think of. Like all of Chevalier's work, a solid, well-made entertainment, about a subject most of us have never given one instant's thought to.

Therein its charm. Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot weren't the women of Jane Austen's novels, and they weren't subjected to the same constraints as those women were. They lived in poverty whether genteel or grinding, and they followed their own interests instead of doing what was thought to be necessary to get a husband. Chevalier points up the ways in which this freedom made the women best able to pursue the passions each might never have known had she been a mother and a wife.

We owe our knowledge of plesiosaurs and other aquatic beasts of the era to these remarkable women, who hunted for and preserved fossils along England's Dorset coast. That Mary Anning was the more productive of the two and that it was she who found the major finds does not minimize the better-off Miss Philpot's many contributions, both emotional and financial, to the process.

In the end, it is the usual suspect, jealousy, that ends the friendship across a generation and a class divide. Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot fall in love with the same man. It leads to the eruption of their other jealousies, of course, and the many things we think but never say come out of each woman's mouth.

Years pass, and many events occur, but unlike theirs, endings are only rarely as good as beginnings. Anning and Philpot lived in a time when the role of a woman was to be of service. Neither had a man to serve, so they served Mankind with their old rock-boned beasts. Much of what we think today would have been harder and later in coming without them, their small but vital role in making modern science what it is.

Remarkable creatures indeed.

THE BLIND CONTESSA'S NEW MACHINE, an extraordinarily beautiful first novel

THE BLIND CONTESSA'S NEW MACHINE
CAREY WALLACE
Penguin Books
$15.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In the early 1800s, a young Italian contessa, Carolina Fantoni, realizes she is going blind shortly before she marries the town's most sought-after bachelor. Her parents don't believe her, nor does her fiancé. The only one who understands is the eccentric local inventor and her longtime companion, Turri. When her eyesight dims forever, Carolina can no longer see her beloved lake or the rich hues of her own dresses. But as darkness erases her world, she discovers one place she can still see--in her dreams. Carolina creates a vivid dreaming life, in which she can not only see, but also fly, exploring lands she had never known.

Desperate to communicate with Carolina, Turri invents a peculiar machine for her: the world's first typewriter. His gift ignites a passionate love affair that will change both of their lives forever.

Based on the true story of a nineteenth-century inventor and his innovative contraption, The Blind Contessa's New Machine is an enchanting confection of love and the triumph of the imagination.

My Review: On the eve of her wedding to the most eligible, handsomest bachelor in her small world, Contessa Carolina Fantoni announces to him that she is going blind. He laughs dismissively, then kisses her indulgently, thus setting the tone for their entire relationship. After full blindness sets in, her eccentric childhood friend and neighbor, a married inventor and amateur scientist, creates for her the world's first typewriter, that she may continue to communicate with the outside world. And thus a passionate affair begins, one that bids fair to destroy two marriages and possibly four lives. That is hardly a new plot nor is there a shocking modern-sensibilities dénouement. But in its bittersweet presentation, it's clear that the author understands the losses of compromise and accommodation that all relationships demand of us.

I am mortally afraid of only a few things in this life: 1) Blindness; 2) being eaten by a shark; and 3) suffocating/drowning. My mother went blind a year or more before she died, and it was a torture. She read passionately, and suddenly couldn't; she was never able to adapt to audiobooks. This rings me like a bell, a tocsin of terror that has me sweating and crying as I type this on a c-o-l-d night. And this book's careful, polished prose made that horrific nightmare (literally for me, at least once a year) endurable, survivable, where in hands less skilled than Carey Wallace's I would simply have burned the book and paid the library for it.

How she did this is, she presented the onset and completion of the process in a series of vignettes that define what it is to see, and to judge the world on what is seen; Wallace makes that process so arbitrary, so essentially meaningless, that as the Contessa charts her progress into eternal night, she and the reader understand that vision as primary perception is a habit of mind. The Contessa plumbs the darkness fearlessly. She lives in it, after she accepts its permanence, with more grace than she appeared to muster during her sighted years.

It's quite a lovely achievement, and it's told in lovely sentences. Wallace, whose author photo rather distressingly resembles a high-school senior picture, had an excellent editor, and handed that editor a lovely book to begin with, you can be sure. This sort of prose doesn't get forged into being on an editor's anvil, it gets the spurs and cracks annealed out of it. Something of the book's raw state remains, thank goodness, because there are some places where opportunities are missed and others are simply AWOL where they would have been welcome. Why thank goodness? Because if this effort were to be perfect, I'd have to hunt this youngster down and kill her in furious writerly envy, that's why.

And I don't want to go to jail over a book.

THE TERRA-COTTA DOG, second Montalbano culinary adventure, I mean mystery!

THE TERRA-COTTA DOG (Inspector Montalbano #2)
ANDREA CAMILLERI (tr. Stephen Sartarelli)
Penguin Books
$12.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The Terra-Cotta Dog opens with a mysterious tête-a-tête with a mafioso, some inexplicably abandoned loot from a supermarket heist, and some dying words that lead inspector Montalbano to a secret grotto in a mountainous cave where two young lovers, dead fifty years and still embracing, are watched over by a life-size terra cotta dog. Montalbano's passion to solve this old crime takes him, heedless of personal danger, on a journey through the island's past and into a family's dark heart amid the horrors of World War II.

My Review: I am truly gruntled and kempt after reading a Montalbano novel. Sleek, in fact; one could go so far as to say consolate.

The mystery, that is the modern-day mystery of arms-dealing and law-breaking, gets short shrift in this delightful book. It gets passed to Montalbano's second-in-command, Augello, at Montalbano's discretion, after Augello pitches a hissy fit and acts like a neglected wife because Montalbano runs a team within a team to do his real work.

Things Go Badly. In fact, a character I loved very much pays the ultimate price for Augello's jealous fit. But Montalbano, whose head everything ultimately falls on, has already turned his attention to Livia, his quite extraordinary lover from Genoa, and a mystery from WWII.

One guess which of those two gets neglected.

The point of these books is how much a mystery gets hold of one, how deeply set the hook is when it's properly baited for the mysterian. (Other than the name of a one-hit wonder band, I've never actually used that word before, and "I do not think that word means what you think it means." {Princess Bride reference}) Sure, yeah, people are smuggling submachine guns and stuff, mmm-hmmm get back to me if something needs my attention but some a-hole killed two kids in the Act of Luuuv 50+ years ago, then put them in a cave where evidence assures us they were NOT shot, and with some very odd burial goods...a bowl of money, a jug of water, and a terra-cotta statue of a dog...and then sealed them up carefully and invisibly. WTF? as Montalbano most certainly wouldn't have thought, who does that? What kind of story makes that not only okay, but so urgent as to force someone to do it?

Exactly what I was wondering. Montalbano is my kinda guy. There are people to *do* the modern-day, not-very-challenging stuff, and even when they get stuff wrong (as they did, to his almost-fatal detriment when a shoot-out costs him the life of a friend and a month in the hospital) things will turn out, they always do...just learn to live with the consequences...but only he, Montalbano, cares to or can ferret out the seemingly unimportant but emotionally charged secrets of the past.

I was walloped upside my little punkin haid by the ending of this book. I could NOT believe an American publishing house would do this! Of course, they only did it ten years after it became a bestseller in *the rest of the world*, but let's let that slide. They did it, thank you Penguin, and they made a lovely object of the book, and they have published all of the series in proper order *smoochsmooch* on their corporate ham-producing-areas to boot!

I won't encourage anyone to read these books because, if you need encouragement, you're not the Right Stuff for them. (*snicker* THAT oughtta cause a stampede!)

THE SHAPE OF WATER, first of the late Camilleri's Montalbano novels

THE SHAPE OF WATER (Inspector Montalbano #1)
ANDREA CAMILLERI (tr. Stephen Sartarelli)
Penguin Books
$6.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Andrea Camilleri's novels starring Inspector Montalbano have become an international sensation and have been translated from Italian into eight languages, ranging from Dutch to Japanese. The Shape of Water is the first book in this sly, witty, and engaging series with its sardonic take on Sicilian life.

Early one morning, Silvio Lupanello, a big shot in the village of Vigàta, is found dead in his car with his pants around his knees. The car happens to be parked in a rough part of town frequented by prostitutes and drug dealers, and as the news of his death spreads, the rumors begin. Enter Inspector Salvo Montalbano, Vigàta's most respected detective. With his characteristic mix of humor, cynicism, compassion, and love of good food, Montalbano goes into battle against the powerful and the corrupt who are determined to block his path to the real killer. This funny and fast-paced Sicilian page-turner will be a delicious discovery for mystery afficionados and fiction lovers alike.

My Review: Television made me do it.

No. Really. There's an Inspector Montalbano mystery TV series made in Italy, filmed in Sicily, and all in Italian with subtitles. Since there are no Italian people in New York City and environs, our local PBS stations AND the city's wholly owned TV station neither one carry it. {/sarcasm}

It was left to a not-very-cultured bud of mine in **DAYTONA, FLORIDA** of all the lowbrow, low-rent places, to gush and rave and generally make a to-do over scrumptious Sicily and handsome Montalbano blah blah blah. Wench. And oh the insufferable coos of "Really? Truly? You haven't even *read* the books? No! Get out!"

THEN, to add insult to injury, who but a cyber-siren (second class) reviewer and friend should pop up with more rapturous flutings about Camilleri and Montalbano and well, you see?? See?! How on earth is one two-eyed human supposed to resist a cyber-siren's enticements? Okay, she's not up there with the Goodreads Gods yet, but just a few more eye grafts and it's Katie bar the door!

So fine fine, I give, five lights, I'll go get the blasted thing. I did, at 2:10pm yesterday. I finished the second read at 4pm today. It's short, obviously, but it's just completely fabulously delicious. It's wry, it's witty, and it's got my favorite quality: Good people do the right thing, even if it's illegal, and bad people don't get away with dick.

Montalbano's got a lover in Genoa, a hot chick who happens to be his friend's daughter, and she's all worked up for him, as well as a murder suspect who is an Italian man's wet dream: tall, blonde, Swedish, racing car driveress. Does he cheat on the lover? No. Does he seem to want to? Not so much, he really can't be bothered about silly stuff like that when the local party big-wig is found half-naked and dead in the local errr, mmm, uuuh "playground" shall we say. The man's widow, completely unfazed by this, helps Montalbano see the details that are wrong, the little discrepancies that shouldn't be noticeable, but when added up make the whole picture...askew.

The resolution to this case is one I wish some publisher would allow an American author to get away with. I just can't say enough about the rightness of it all. Sicily needs me, I must fly there immediately! Well, via Camilleri's books. And over a smallish Northeastern city, where I plan to *bomb* a Certain Cyber-Siren Party's residence.