Isabel reviews Man from the South
This is a story from ‘Man from the South and other stories’ by Roald Dahl. It’s a mixture of unrelated stories but with something in common - all of them have a moral.
Man from the South is about a strange old man who was spending time by the hotel swimming-pool. There, he met a young sailor and proposed him to make a bet. If the sailor could light his lighter ten times without any mistakes, he would win the old man’s Cadillac, but if he failed, he would lose one of his fingers. The guy accepted it, but when they were finishing the game, a woman appeared and made them stop. She said she owned the Cadillac and the man had no money because she had won it all from him. Then she showed her hand with only one finger.
As for the characters, they are very different. The old man is strange, mysterious and he has a problem with bets. The sailor is a typical young man who doesn’t like to lose at anything. We don’t have a lot of details about the narrator.
In conclusion, I enjoyed the story. The moral of the story is related to the sin of avarice. In this case, if you are too greedy you will lose a lot of fingers! All the stories from the book have the same end: a moral. I think that it is interesting to read something you learn from, or at least you think about . What I like the most about this book is that when I finished each story, I stopped for a while and started to think about the story, realising that all the little details have a sense. I also loved ‘The Landlady’ and ‘Beware of the Dog’.
Finally I would recommend this book to everybody, above all ‘The Landlady’ and ‘Beware of the Dog’, because it has different short stories with different and amazing plots, and if you don’t like one of them, I am sure that you will prefer the next.
