Taste and Other Tales - level 5 - Penguin Readers.pdf - Penguin Readers - sebex53

Taste

and Other Tales

ROALD DAHL

Level 5

Selected and retold by Michael Caldon

Series Editors: Andy Hopkins and Jocelyn Potter

Pearson Education Limited

Edinburgh Gate, Harlow,

Essex CM20 2JE, England

and Associated Companies throughout the world.

Contents

ISBN-10: 0-582-41943-3

ISBN-13: 978-0-582-41943-8

page

Introduction

First published in the Longman Simplified English Series 1979

in association with Michael Joseph Ltd.

First published in Longman Fiction 1993

This adaptation first published in 1996

Taste

A Swim

This edition first published 1999

Mrs Bixby and the Colonel's Coat

9 10

The Way up to Heaven

NEW EDITION

The Sound Machine

The stories contained in this edition are published internationally,

in translation, by the following publishers: Gallimard in France,

Rowohlt in Germany, Meulenhoff in The Netherlands, Hayakawa in Japan,

Trebi in Sweden and Gyldendal in Denmark.

The Leg of Lamb

Birth and Fate

Poison

Cover design by Bender Richardson White

Activities

Set in ll/14pt Bembo

Printed in China

SWTC/09

For a complete list of titles available in the Penguin Readers series please write to your local

Pearson Education office or contact: Penguin Readers Marketing Department,

Pearson Education, Edinburgh Gate, Harlow, Essex, CM20 2JE.

Introduction

These strange and unusual stories were written by a man who is

one of the most popular storytellers of our time. Roald Dahl was

born in South Wales in 1916 to Norwegian parents, and his early

life was overshadowed by sad events: his sister and his father died

within a few weeks of each other when he was very young. He

was educated at a boarding school for boys, but he did not fit in

easily with the life of the school and had a very unhappy time. As

a result of his experiences there, some of the stories he wrote later

feature characters who are cruel to those who have been cruel to

them.

After leaving school, Dahl went to work for the Shell Oil

Company in London and in Africa, and when the Second World

War started he joined the Royal Air Force. He served as a fighter

pilot in North Africa, where he was badly injured in a plane

crash, and then in Greece and Syria. In 1942 he accepted a post

as a British military official in Washington, and it was here that he

began to have some success as a writer. He succeeded in selling a

number of stories based on his wartime flying adventures to a

newspaper called the Saturday Evening Post, and after the war

ended he became increasingly known as a writer.

In 1953 Dahl married the American actress Patricia Neal,

with whom he had one son and four daughters. Many of his best

books for young people grew out of stories that he invented for

his children at bedtime. But Dahl's life was still clouded by family

misfortune: one of his daughters died when she was seven years

old, and his wife was very ill while the children were young. In

1983 his marriage to Patricia ended, and he married Felicity Ann

Crosland. Dahl died in 1990 at the age of seventy-four.

Over to You (1946) was Dahl's first collection of stories, based

on his years as a pilot. Other collections for adults which achieved

wide popularity include Someone Like You (1953), Kiss, Kiss (1960)

and Switch Bitch (1974). A number of these stories were rewritten

for television as Tales of the Unexpected. It is the development of

the action rather than that of the characters that is central to

Dahl's writing, and his stories are characterized by the presence

of an unusual twist at the end. He admitted that he found it

increasingly hard to find new ideas for his adult fiction, and this

was when he began to write for children. He had great success

with his young readers, who love Dahl's dark humour and the

sense that his characters can make anything happen if they want

it enough. Many adults, among them parents, teachers and

librarians, have voiced objections to what they consider to be bad

manners and violence in Dahl's books, but children do not seem

to share these worries.

Dahl wrote nineteen children's books in all. The first was James

and the Giant Peach (1961), in which a boy crosses the Atlantic

Ocean inside a large piece of fruit, together with some very big

insects. While on a tour of a magical and mysterious chocolate

factory in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), Charlie sees

four unpleasant children disappear. This book became a best-

seller as soon as it appeared and was made into a very successful

film in 1971. Many of the children's stories present ugly and

unpleasant characters to whom unpleasant things happen. George's

Marvellous Medicine (1981) is about a boy who has a mean, unkind

grandmother; in return for her unkindness, he gives her a

medicine which does strange and terrible things to her. Children

love Revolting Rhymes (1982), in which traditional stories are

retold as poems in amusing ways.

Dahl also wrote for the cinema, including the screenplay for

You Only Live Twice (1967) and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968).

Parts of his own life story are told in Boy (1984), about his early

life and schooldays, and Going Solo (1986), in which he describes

his flying days. Dahl has won many prizes for his writing over the

years, and his work continues to be popular with children and

adults all over the world.

All the stories in this book have wonderfully inventive story lines

with a twist in the tail. The characters are ordinary and

respectable on the surface, but many of them have an

unexpectedly dark and cruel side to their personality. Tension is

built up around the relationships between the various characters.

Often a husband and wife are involved in mind games in which

their hatred for each other is rarely mentioned or acted on until

it has built up to an unbearable level.

A harmless guessing game between two lovers of good wine

suddenly becomes deadly serious, while a competition on board

a ship has an even more serious result for one of the competitors.

Mrs Bixby is faced with a difficult problem when her lover gives

her an expensive gift, and Mrs Foster's terrible fear of being late

is cruelly used by her husband. And what are the frightening

sounds that Klausner can hear on the strange machine he has

built? These situations, and more, develop in unexpected ways in

this excellent collection of Dahl's finest stories.

vii

Taste and Other Tales - level 5 - Penguin Readers.pdf

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