![]() ![]() He also applied Chinese burns to the skin of Welch’s wrist. Wanting to know more about Welch, I picked up what I could and, unhappily, discovered this: “Dahl would catch him and twist his arm behind his back until tears came. ![]() An ephemeral, everyday experience like unjustified anger is described offhandedly, but down to its essence, so that the reader feels recognized and reads on. Considering this, the books should not be page-turners, and yet they are. The narrators pay an inordinate amount of attention to antiques and to the decorative flourishes on gates and churches. His writing is quiet at first glance, careful. Convalescing, he came to see his past as more alive than his future, and he spent the years until his death at 33 exploring that past in autobiographical novels and short stories. At twenty years old, he was struck by a car and left with a fractured spine and chronic pain. Born a year before Dahl, Welch spent his childhood shuttling between England and his father’s work in China. I thought about Dahl again recently while reading the work of his once-classmate, Denton Welch. As a child, I loved Roald Dahl for the reasons all his fans do, for his inventiveness, for the integrity of his worlds, for his readiness to admit to children what they already know: that there is such a thing as cruelty. ![]()
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