This Roald Dahl guy is pretty amazing eh? It’s not until my 35th year that I actually finished this book, while when I was too young I tried to read Tom Clancy instead. What a dumbass. I wonder if I would have liked the BFG then as I did now. To read Roald Dahl is to abandon your understanding of reality and to immerse yourself in an out-of-this-world storytelling. An unpopular opinion: All adults should read or reread BFG, or heck, any Roald Dahl book.
I believe there is no need to recap the story, as it is embedded already to the minds of schoolchildren and everybody who had been one, even like me, who had never read the book from start to finish until recently. The Spielberg adaptation was a boost to make the tale more popular, and if it hasn’t already been so, reinstating Dahl’s relevance to young people. Here’s to a hope that they will pick up a book and continue to do so.
Personally for me, BFG is the story of underdogs — Sophie as the friendless orphan and the BFG as undersized giant who refused to eat human beings for pleasure and nourishment, and instead, opting for the almost inedible snozzcumber. I cannot help but root for underdogs. Sophie, together with the BFG have great dynamics as they learn a little more from each other, and as we learn more about the BFG and like his character more and more.
But read BFG not just for the imaginative world, but for its language. My goodness the language of the BFG! Made up words somehow sound better in a Roald Dahl book out of the mouth of the BFG (“What I mean and I what I say is two different things”). See you later, grammar. Yet this inventive and atrociously incorrect language elevates the book so much more. I cannot in my life imagine still what a humplecrimp, wraprascal or crumpscoddle look like, yet these words made me smile.
And I love the BFG for being the dream catcher — to capture dreams as fireflies to put them in the jar and to give children pleasant dreams. The thought alone of a friendly giant who gifts dreams to children while they sleep is pleasing, and I love the premise.
I am surprised in some ways of the brutality of some of the scenes in this book, though I cannot speak for little children, whether it is too early for them to imagine other children falling victims to giants, eaten to the bone. But like I said, as grownups we can laugh at this violence and shrug it off. It makes the giants more menacing and the payoff at the end more satisfying.
