Started: September 2, 2021
Finished: September 8, 2021
My History With This Book
My 3rd grade teacher read this book aloud to us during story time. I remember laughing a lot when she read it to us.
Why I Re-read This Book Now
If you've been following this blog, you know that I've been re-reading a number of childhood classics because my wife has been reading them for the first time. So far I've re-read and reviewed Charlotte's Web, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, and Harry Potter.
After my wife finished Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, she was eager to read more Roald Dahl, and asked me for my recommendations. (At the time we were in the stage of the lockdown when we could still get books delivered to us--before things got really strict.)
I turned my memory back to which other Roald Dahl books I remembered fondly from childhood, and came up with The BFG and The Witches. So my wife ordered those off the Internet, and she read them, and now I'm re-reading them after her. (The Witches will be my next reading.)
As I've been re-discovering these childhood classics, I've been realizing that I actually only barely remember them. It's funny--you don't realize how much you've forgotten about a book until you go back and re-read it. With Charlotte's Web, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, I had remembered a couple scenes very vividly, and the vividness of the memory of those couple scenes made me feel like I remembered the whole book. But actually, all I remembered was a couple scenes.
It was the same with the BFG. I remembered that it was about a girl and a giant. And I remembered very well the scene in which the Giant talks about the magical soda with the bubbles that float down instead of up, which result in some kind of magical farts. (I remember the smirk on our 3rd grade teacher's face as she read that scene to us, and I remember how much laughter that scene got from the class.) But, when I was talking to my wife about this book, it turned out that I remembered nothing else about the book.
Well, all the more reason to re-read it. And now here I am with my review after re-reading.
The Review After Re-Reading (SPOILER warning)
As mentioned above, I remember really loving this book in 3rd grade--even if I didn't remember the specifics, I certainly remember enjoying it. I remember the whole class often laughing as the teacher read the book.
So I was expecting to fall in love with it all over again. Especially after having recently re-read, and loved, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
I regret to say, however, that The BFG doesn't hold up quite as well to re-reading as an adult.
I don't really have anything bad to say about it. It wasn't terrible or anything. But it wasn't particularly great either.
Well, let me see if I can conjure up a few comments for the sake of this review:
Among the many things I had forgotten about, I had completely forgotten about the BFG's peculiar speech patterns. He makes up his own words, and he uses incorrect grammar. It was, in retrospect, probably not the best book to recommend to my poor wife (who is learning English as a second language.) She ended up having a lot of questions for me as she read the book, asking me to explain this word or that, and I ended up having to just tell her that many of these words were nonsense. (She still enjoyed the book on the whole.)
"That is a squelching tricky problem around here," the BFG answered. "In this sloshflunking Giant Country, happy eats like pineapples and pigwinkles is simply not growing. Nothing is growing except for one extremely icky-poo vegetable. It is called the snozzcumber." (p.48)
Actually, now that I think about it, I'm fairly sure my 3rd grade teacher read out the BFG's dialogue in a funny voice. (She was very good at doing voices for the different characters in children's books.) And we all laughed a lot. As an adult, however, I don't find it quite as funny as I did when I was in 3rd grade.
The other thing I've come to realize as an adult is that this book is not nearly as imaginative as Roald Dahl's other books. (Sorry, fans of this book.) The land of the giants is really bland--it's just a faraway land which looks like a desert, and where giants live.
The idea of catching dreams is kind of clever, I guess, but the land of Dream Country is not particularly imaginative. It's just described as a misty place.
The resolution of the book also isn't particularly clever. They end up defeating the bad giants by just tying them up while they are sleeping. That's not a particularly inventive storyline.
All in all, despite the fact that I have fond memories of this book from childhood, I can't help but feel this isn't Roald Dahl's best effort.
The illustrations in this book are good though. And I think in a children's book like this, part of the enjoyment comes from the illustrations, so I'm going to count this as a positive. The illustrations aren't particularly detailed, but they have that classic weird Roald Dahl flavor. They were done by Roald Dahl's favorite illustrator Quentin Blake.
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| Image taken from HERE, but also on page 56 on my edition |
(The illustrations in my edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator were also by Quentin Blake, but in those cases he wasn't the original illustrator. In The BFG, however, Quentin Blake is the original and only illustrator. So I kind of feel like this book is his just as much as it is Dahl's.)
Other Notes
* Another thing I remember about Roald Dahl from childhood is that he always had a dark sense of humor. That is definitely true of this book. Several children end up being eaten by the bad giants in this book--granted the reader only hears about it after it happened, and it wasn't any characters we knew, but still... pretty grim stuff for a children's book. Which, of course, is why children love Roald Dahl so much.
* I didn't realize it until I re-read it, but this book was published in 1982. Which means, when my 3rd grade teacher read it to us in mid-80s, the book was only a few years old at that time. I had just always assumed it was an old children's classic. (Well, I guess now it can be considered an old children's classic.)
* Nothing really makes logical sense in this book. For example, the giants go off every night to all different areas of the world to eat human beings. So by the logic of this book, it's night all over the world everywhere at once. What about time zones? And why do the giants never get seen by human beings?
...and many, many other things that don't make logical sense. Of course, it's a children's book, and a silly children's book at that, so you're not supposed to expect it to make sense, right? But on the other hand, if nothing in the book makes any sense, then does that interfere with our ability to get involved in the story?
* I think that's all I have to say about this one. Sorry, not a lot of deep thoughts.
September 5, 2021: The BFG by Roald Dahl p.1-120
Video Review (Playlist HERE)
The Roald Dahl interview I mentioned is here: https://youtu.be/w3NEMdwkIl0
This seems like a great thing to do (rereading children's books) especially in your line of work. I am wondering about this nonsense word issue (less concerned about the grammar, but hey, I studied a lot of linguistics and we are all descriptivists!).
ReplyDeleteSo, if you take a word like "snozzcumber," my initial thought would be that it would be great for young readers who are already fairly adept, as it forces us to break up the word into a part we might be familiar with ("cumber") and one that is goofy ("snozz")-- in a way, this opens up the door to reading longer words which we have to essentially break down when we are learning to read. We might, as beginning readers recognize "cucumber" as a "whole word" but changing the prefix here might help us, say, when we encounter the word "encumber" to take an example, which seems pretty unlikely we could as beginning readers recognize in one go/all at once.
My other quick guess is that a bit of silliness in children's books might be okay as English (and all natural languages, but maybe especially English) is super flexible. When I have to deal with ESL students as a college instructor, a big challenge they have is confidence because of all of the complexity and variation in the language, but getting comfortable with silliness might be a benefit?
That being said, it maybe doesn't look like a great ESL book, but might be better suited for native speakers?
Anyway, when I read your complaint about the story and plot, I was reminded of the time Fry beats the brain species in Futurama by writing a story in which they leave Earth-- "now you are stuck in the world I created-- a world of plot holes and spelling errors." Heh heh.
Hi Dave,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment.
Yeah, agreed. For native speaker children, I think the fun with the grammar and words is all part of the fun.
Although there are some hints that Roald Dahl himself is a prescriptivist--the giant's grammar is meant as something to be laughed at, and the giant himself is constantly ashamed because he never learned how to speak properly at school. The end of the book is that the giant reads a lot of Charles Dickens and Shakespeare and learns how to speak and write properly at last!
But putting that bit aside...
...yeah, I think this book is great fun for native speaker children. But not so good for ESL. So I kind of regret having recommended it to my wife, but she did alright with it in the end. Once I told her that the giant's grammar and words weren't proper, then she went along with it.
Did you ever read this book as a kid? Do you have any memories of it?