Tales of Craving and Desire by Roald Dahl
I couldn’t believe it when I stumbled across my favourite childhood writer Roald Dahl writing in the genre of eroticism!
Published as a collection of short stories in 2016 going back to 1945 I couldn’t help feeling these were true tales from a writers life, rather than his norm of fiction they felt like diary entries! Could RD have written these as fictional memoir?
At first I thought him stuffy in his opinions around women and sex but I realised that was as much about the era these stories were written in than the opinions of the writer himself. I always think of Jane Austen and how she would have written sex scenes; I would want her to be fully expressive but the reality is there is no way she could be.
Touring with Sexpo opened my eyes to the eyes wide shut, so many surrounded by sex and yet still whispering about the glaringly obvious.
How fantastic of Mr Fox to write in a genre so opposed to his norm of youth and yet did he actually want these published? Were they personal scripts? It does beg the question who has the right to publish your work?
It paints a very different vision of this revered man, I’m not sure I’ll be sharing these books with my daughter even when she does turn 21!
Check them out!