El gran cambiazo

The four stories collected in this book, which was awarded the Grand Prix de l’Humour Noir, showcase Roald Dahl at his best: a cocktail that is at once burlesque, baroque, and macabre, tender and cruel, light and unsettling, a recipe that demands immense talent and imagination, and one that this author undoubtedly possessed. Two of them, “The Visitor” and “Bitch,” are excerpts from the Imaginary Diary of Oswald Hendryks Cornelius, a kind of modern-day Don Juan, a refined aesthete, wealthy and worldly; a diary so scandalous—the narrator warns us—that, by comparison, Casanova’s Memoirs seem like a parish newsletter.