nakijken boekbespreking Engels

[thali]

Zou iemand hier ajb de fouten willen uithalen?

Tales of the unexpected by Roald Dahl

William and Mary (p152)
Mrs. Pearl, inherited all the property of her husband William.
At the moment she wanted to leave the office of the solicitor, he gave her an envelope, sent by her husband. She accepted the envelope and went homewards. Probably it would be a typical William letter.
She sat down on the sofa without removing her hat or her coat and Mary opened the letter. She began to get suspicious when she saw the contents of the envelope: 20 sheets in businesslike manner.

After a week alone in the house, she sometimes had an uneasy feeling that William was still there, following her around, staring at her from doorways from empty chairs, through a window at night she started reading. The letter was nothing but an attempt on his part to explain her precisely what Landy had done to him and why he had agreed that he should do it and what his theories and his hopes were: William suffered from Cancer, one of the few remaining diseases that these modern drugs can’t cure. A surgeon can operate if it has not spread too far; but with William, not only did he left it too late, but the thing had had the effrontery to attack him in the pancreas, making both surgery and survival equally impossible.
So there he was with somewhere between one and six months left to live, growing more and more melancholy every hour.
And then there was, on a Tuesday morning, all of a sudden, Landy. John Landy, a neuro-surgeon, he and William have been friendly for at least nine years, but Mary had never met him.
He wasn’t like all the other visitors, he did know what to say. It was refreshing for mr Pearl to have a visitor brave enough to touch upon the forbidding subject.
Landy had a preposition for William: a great deal to gain, especially after he was dead. William had the feeling that John was expecting him to jumb when he said. “This is a thing, William, that I’ve been working on quietly for some years,” he began. He was inspirated by a short medical film: a dog’s head, seperated from the body, sitting there all alone on a sort of tray, was alive. The brain was functioning, that was proved by several tests. His own thought, which grew out of seeing this film, was to remove the brain from the skull of a human and keep it alive and functioning as an indepent unit for an unlimited period after he is dead. Williams brain, for example, after he would be dead.
Landy was so entranced and bemused by the whole idea that he evidently found it impossible to believe mr Pearl might not be feeling the same way.
John Landy was sure it would be an almost perfect situation: he wouldn’t possibly feel pain because there wouldn’t be any nerves to feel it with. No worries or fears or pains or hunger or thirst. Not even desires. Just his memories and his thoughts, and if the remaining eye happened to function, then he could read books as well.
After his explanation, Landy went out quickly, leaving him in a disturbed state of mind. Somehow, William didn’t find it nice at all. There was something basically repulsive about the idea that he, himself with all his mental faculties intact, should be reduced to a small slimy blob lying in a pool of water. Another thing that bothered him was the feeling of helplessness that he was bound to experience once Landy had got him into the basin. There could be no going back after that, no way of protesting or explanation. He would be committed for as long as they could keep him alive.
But then quite suddenly, round about midday, his mood began to change. He became less concerned with the unpleasant aspect of the affair and found himself able to examine Landy’s proposals in a more reasable light.
He was going to do it. And from then on, he began to feel very much better.
Mrs Pearl found the whole thing just too awful to think about. Beastly and awful. It gave her the shudders.
At last, she called Landy, like William asked in his letter. Mr Landy wondered if she would care to come over there to the hospital. He told her it’s not only alive, but it recovered consciousness on the second day and the eye was seeing.
Half an hour later, Mary was at the hospital. Landy opened a door and ushered her into a small quare room. He was larger than she had imagined he would be, and darker in colour. With all the ridges and creases running over his surface, he reminded her of nothing so much as an enormous pickled walnut. She stepped up to the edge of the table, leaned forward until her face was directly over the basin, and looked straight down into William’s eye. The eye bright as ever, stared back at her with a peculiar fixed intensity.
It was a queer sensation peering into her husband’s eye when there was no face to go with it. All she had to look at was the eye, and she kept staring at it.
Mary Pearl wanted to take hime with her back home. Landy thought she was joking. William was an experiment, he couldn’t possibly be moved.
But she was serious and she thought there was a possibility that she could dominate William like a pet.


It’s one of the most stupid story’s I’ve ever read. The explanations how Landy is going to do it and the discriptions of the brain of William are disgusting.
Besides, something like this is impossible: a dog’s head who can survive without skull, where has Roald Dahl found that? It’s impossible, even with the medical development of the past few years. It’s possible to clone someone, it’s possible to compose your child, but a man who can lives after he died, I’m sorry, that’s too much. I can accept a lot of things, but this is to much for my imagination.
And how can a woman loves a man who has treated her like that? He harassed her during their marriage. He disapproved a lot of things, she even called him ‘Wiliam, the great disapprover’. They didn’t have childeren, because he had disapproved of childeren.
If I would be the general editor, I would forbide to print the story and launch it. For me it’s a riddle how this book has been reprint so many times. Probably the other tales are better. I hope anyway.