SM
Worth a re-read. Started strong but began to drag towards the end (could just be me). Stunned to find a mention of a Malay Singaporean gay man as that is very rare representation. The ending was poignant but sad. Overall a good insight into the triumphs and challenges of queer men living the big city life, as the title goes.
Short stories that sometimes felt a tad too long. My faves are the “The Girl With the Double Eyelids” and “Power and Control”.
I snapped up this book firstly because of Ivan Brunetti's lovely illustrations on the book cover. But my secondhand copy of this 2011 edition is worth having just for the introduction by Lev Grossman, Time magazine book critic and author. In it, he compares Willy Wonka's chocolate factory to “Dante's Inferno, and to the Mines of Moria dug by the dwarves in The Lord of the Rings.” Unlike those places,
“Wonka's underworld isn't a hellish underworld. It's an inverted paradise. The dwarves, Tolkien wrote, “dug too greedily and too deep,” and they were punished for it: they disturbed the sleep of the terrible Balrog. But in Dahl's imagination the rules are reversed. He gives us the impression that Wonka can dig as greedily and deep as he likes, and things will just keep getting better.”
it is only when he gives in to buying a second candy bar, with money he doesn't really have, that Dahl rewards him with the Golden Ticket.