Zgodan blurb za ovaj roman (i za većinu drugih Dalovih dečjih knjiga) glasio bi "VDDŽ - knjiga od koje roditelji padaju u nesvest, dok deca uživaju u njoj". Jer deca vole džinove ljudoždere koji za noć pojedu pola ženskog internata i jednako vole da ih stigne zaslužena kazna. I da, knjiga je uzbudljiva i originalna i pravi jezički vatromet (sve pohvale za kreativnost prevoda Jelene Katić Živanović, od Kostokrca do zvrjoprasa).
E sad, odrasli odnos prema Dalu je dosta podvojeniji jer tu (recimo) postane znatno primetniji njegov rasizam i (recimo) veličanje britanske krune koje stvarno nije moralo toliko da se nagazi i (recimo) sadizam koji... pa nije baš da ga nema. Pa vi vidite sami šta će da pretegne.

This is such an adorable fairy tale, and that ending has got me all smiling and happy happy.

In Roald Dahl's imagination, giants not only exist, but most of them like to guzzle and swallomp nice little chiddlers.

Luckily, the BFG (Big Friendly Giant) does not swallomp nice little chiddlers; instead, he collects, manufactures, and shares dreams. Together, he and 8-year-old Sophie save the day – with a little help from the queen of England. This is a common and empowering theme in children's books: children can be powerful in ways that adults often are not.

This theme redeems The BFG from other sins. By all accounts, Roald Dahl was a horrible person (his characterizations of countries, races, etc., are dated and not at all politically correct), but he was also tremendously talented and had an extraordinary imagination. He remains very readable. "Am I right or am I left?"

Although The BFG was apparently written for a 8-year-old, it is probably aimed at somewhat older children and very readable even for people well beyond childhood.

David Williams read my version of this book, wonderfully. Listening to Williams would also make this book easier for earlier readers who might struggle with his malapropisms and grammatical errors. Mine was a stressful week, but it was difficult to listen to this without smiling.

re-read.

I remember reading this and not being able to put it down. Re-reading it now is obviously a different experience.

It's far more simplistic than I remember, full of grotesque things that delight younger readers. It also felt terribly English too.

But when I was younger this was a fave of mine. To be honest, it has dated a little, bit I still think it wonderful. And I think it's still a magical book for younger readers.

So this was ... different.
In the beginning I really wasn't sure whether to give this 3 or 4 stars.
You see, at first I wasn't all that much into the story. Sure, it was nice but the way the BFG talked was a bit tiresome and the story also seemed to drag on a little making it only slightly better than the 2nd Charlie Bucket book and not as good as the one about the giant peach.
However, it might just have been my mood (for some reason not much could hold my interest which is why I read quite a lot very short Kindle stories in between). Or the book improved over time. It could have also been a little bit of both.
Anyway, what makes this book really great is its advocacy against bullyism and the moral that wit is always better than muscles if you use it correctly.


The story, in short, is about an orphaned girl, Sophie, who wakes up one night and witnesses a giant. Because she has seen him, he has to take her with him so she can't tell other humans. However, he doesn't want to eat her like she feared because he isn't like the other giants (there's 9 of them) - he is a big friendly giant. But what to do about the others?!


As much as I grew tired of the BFG's speech, it was also hilarious at times and the sillyness really had a message of its own: it's like the Queen said - not educated but in no way stupid.
Probably the best word play was how the BFG called Charles Dickens Dahl's Chickens. MUHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Moreover, the fact that the Queen herself was one of the characters and the way she was described
was simply cool (there is no other word for it)!
And how I loathed the Queen's military advisers - in fact, one of the other HUGE plus factors of the book was their description and how they were shut down by the BFG and the others! The other one being the greatest joke in the book: "Do not feed the Giants!" *lol*.

The book had, as you can see here in my review, the usual cute and funny and wonderful illustrations by Quentin Blake (same procedure as in the other books).

All in all, not as good as the other books but not bad either. For the above mentioned reasons I can unfortunately not give it the full 4 stars though.
@Paul: You see now why we desperately need half stars here on GR???

n  “We is in Dream Country,' the BFG said. 'This is where all dreams is beginning.” n

I love the BFG, as a child this was one of my favourite books (and films.) There’s just something captivating about the story, about how a mystical creature could appear in your bedroom in the middle of the night and take you to another world (a more exciting world.)

And that’s why Roald Dahl is such a successful children’s author; here he does exactly what the best books in the genre do. He gives you a glimpse of the real world, of the standard realities of everyday, then underneath it all he reveals something spectacular: he reveals fantasy. Time and time again a child is whisked off to experience the adventure of a lifetime. And when reading his books as a child of similar age, it’s so easy to imagine yourself in the shoes of one of his protagonists.

Reading it as an adult, gives the book a slightly different flavour. For starters, the hilarious nature of the language is blatant. And it just feels funnier. I was invested in this as a child, I cared about the characters and I was worried about what could happen. Now it just seems all so ridiculous.

It was fun and entertaining, revisiting a book I read fifteen years ago.

Just as delightful as I remember! :)

It is a page-turner, sweet, and funny book. The BFG’ language is really interesting. You’ll enjoy the good nature of BFG and Sophie.

I love the BFG's speech - so original. The tale is loads of fun. The fact that the giant gives people good dreams is enough to convince me he is a Big friendly Giant. There are beautiful moments in this story and I am impressed by how unique the story is. James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the chocolate factory are better, but not by much. This is a fantastic story.

I remember my brother read this as a kid while I was reading Matilda. I thought about reading the story too, but I didn't because I didn't like the title. What was a BFG, I thought? Seriously, that was my reasoning I missed out on this great story as a kid. Too bad I didn't have reading friends to talk books and someone could have told me to read it. I sure wasn't going to listen to my brother back then.

This book has a really interesting play with language, consequence of Dahl's genius. It can be read in that way as a child's Ulysses. Very fun, simple plot, if slightly odd. I missed reading this as a child. As an adult I enjoyed this hugely, but I know I would have LOVED it as a child. The story has a pleasurable pace and kept me engaged, the characters were beautifully described with attention to detail and humour. It's Roald Dahl, what is there not to love!? A classic! My inner child is smiling with glee!

honestly a life of solitude in which i am surrounded by dreams in jars and people have given me a cool nickname with an initialism for short and then later i become best friends with a quirky little girl and i meet the queen of england...

well, that sounds pretty good to me.

part of a series i'm doing in which i review books i read a long time ago

A 24-foot dirty old man creeps down the streets late at night, when all the grown-ups are asleep, peering in through little children's windows. No, not the subject of a court case, just a momentously popular piece of fiction by the much beloved Roald Dahl.
Anyway, returning to our story. . .
In one of his hands, the giant holds “what looks like a long thin trumpet”. He peers into the bedroom of two sleeping children, lifts his trumpet-like thing and whoof! - blows something mysterious into their room. Realising, however, that he has been spotted by our young heroine, Sophie, he creeps over to her room and, in a memorable chapter enigmatically entitled The Snatch, kidnaps her. Once in his grasp, Sophie experiences an exhilarating sensation, rather like flying, before finding herself imprisoned in his cave.
Some parents may, of course, be concerned about the predicament Sophie finds herself in, but Dahl take great pains to allay these fears. For a start, Sophie has no parents who will notice her disappearance, and has in fact been liberated from a quite frightful orphanage. What is more, her terror is short-lived and she grows to love her imprisoner, enraptured by the bizarre and wildly amusing anecdotes, to which she is such a patient listener, just as well as these take up approximately three-quarters of this classic modern fairytale.
A further criticism of Dahl is that he is actually not that original, nor particularly witty, nor in fact funny in the slightest. The BFG certainly puts those claims to rest! I like to imagine Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker turning green with envy as the BFG embarks on a series of scintillating witticisms concerning the taste of “human beans” (“Beans”, note, not “beings”!) from different countries: the Turks, for example, “is tasting of turkey”, the Greeks is “tasting greasy”, while those from Wales “taste fishy” - like those greatest of all fish, the whales!
As usual, the politically correct brigade will no doubt be sharpening their blue pencils at these supposed 'racist' stereotypes. I shall deal with these accusations later. For now, let us simply revel in the BFG's unique way with words: his spoonerisms, his neologisms, his malapropisms, his wonderjumbly mouthgurgles of stunning originality, given that Roald, as we know, spent all his waking hours in his famous hut and would never have seen Professor Stanley Unwin on the telly.
Dahl is, above all, a master of simile – he memorably describes the BFG in Chapter 3 as having “an arm as thick as a tree-trunk”; so memorably, indeed, that it instantly sprang back to my mind while reading Chapter 9's description of the Bloodbottler, with his “finger as large as a tree trunk” - a cunning way of establishing the difference in size between the two giants!
This brings me to the one matter which does bother me about the BFG. Having firmly established that this novel has no improper overtones, the exact mechanics of the kiss scene between the BFG and Sophie are still problematic. By my calculations, the BFG's mouth would have to be at least ten inches wide, possibly larger (according to Quentin Blake's illustrations, which Dahl of course approved, I'd reckon up to two feet). With a mouth considerably larger than Sophie's entire face, what exactly would this kiss have entailed? At the very least, one would have thought, it would have posed the threat of suffocation. Still, given the equally enormous dimensions of the BFG's tongue, we can certainly rule out any improprieties in this regard!
But we are leaping ahead. No account of this wonderful tale would be complete without a mention of the BFG's diet: the enormous and repugnant Snozzcumber. Those who wish to see indecent
suggestion in everything will no doubt make much of this long phallic vegetable, foul-tasting and “covered all over with coarse knobbles”. I can only feel sorry for these people, being unable to enjoy at face-value the hilarious scene as the BFG urgently entreats little Sophie to taste his snozzcumber, whereupon, having taken a reluctant nibble, she promptly spits it out, declaring that it tastes of “frogskins. . .and rotten fish”.
Sudden ejaculation is very much a part of the following chapter also, as the vile Bloodbottler is tricked into having his own chomp on the BFG's snozzcumber. For those who haven't yet had the pleasure of reading the book, I won't reveal exactly what happens next – other than that poor Sophie ends up “covered in snozzcumber and giant spit”. It's fortunate that this gruesome experience is soon followed by the delights of frobscottle and watching the dirty old giant blow off in front of her!
But the BFG is, of course, primarily a novel about dreams – the dreams the friendly giant catches, stores in jars, and blows into children's heads. After suffering the beastly attentions of the other giants, the BFG exacts a splendid revenge by bestowing a Trogglehumper on the Fleshlumpeater. However, the great coup de grace is saved for the climactic scenes of the novel, when the BFG enacts every little boy's fantasy by getting out his trumpet-like thing in the Queen's own bedroom and blowing a dream into the head of the Mother of the Nation.
The very idea of going to the Queen to solve one's deepest problem is yet another example of the stunning originality of this remarkable book. One hopes it will not lead to thousands of people writing letters to Her Majesty, imploring her to help with every vexation from troublesome neighbours to unfair treatment at the hands of the inland revenue!
And what an affectionate and affecting portrait of our monarch Dahl has given us. I like to think of the great writer up in his private writing shed with a well-thumbed copy of Majesty and a box of tissues at the ready, as his old eye weeps at the thought of the grace and beauty of our sovereign. I imagine Swift turning green with envy as his cheap malevolent shots at royalty in Gulliver's Travels are superceded by Dahl's own take on the giant in the palace, with its wonderful evocation of the dignity and warmth of Elizabeth II, summed up so eloquently by the secret smile that flickers on her lips as the BFG lets fly at the breakfast table.
Much, however, has been made of the fact that Dahl portrays England and Sweden, quite accurately, as having constitutional monarchs, while Baghdad (i.e. Iraq), rather less accurately, has a “sultan” of a regime where “we are chopping off people's heads like you are chopping parsley”. For heaven's sake, I want to cry – exotic dark-skinned individuals have been a staple of children's fiction for centuries! Speaking of which, do we really have to defend the fact that the malevolent giants are also dark-skinned, have thick lips and wear nothing but loincloths? Dahl is simply creating suitable bogeymen to posit a fearful threat to the angelic English children, with their “inky-booky” flavour and Eton and Roedean educations. Only the most relentless PC obsessive could draw a parallel between this threat and the fear of being “swamped by an alien culture”, as Margaret Thatcher memorably described the fear of coloured immigration shortly before the Tory 1979 election campaign in which Dahl ardently assisted, shortly before writing The BFG.
Next the critics will be drawing a parallel between Mrs Thatcher's enthusiastic use of military force in the 1982 Falklands War and Dahl's employment of the British military establishment to subdue the giants! This, however, would completely ignore the friendly giant's homilies against the human race's internecine conflicts - “shootling guns and going up in aeroplanes to drop their bombs on each other every week”. Or maybe the critics think Dahl is merely a hypocrite given to sentimental moral platitudes while actively promoting a love of conflict, simplistic demonisation of the enemy and desire for violent revenge. Several million nine year olds will beg to differ!
Those given to pusillanimous nit-picking will no doubt take issue with Dahl's assertion that “human beans” are the only creatures that kill their own kind. Not strictly true, I'll warrant, or even true in the slightest, but we must remember that Dahl was already old when writing The BFG, had received a severe knock on the head when crash-landing in Libya, and, like his simple, uneducated hero was an endearingly dotty individual. If we really must pick holes in The BFG, we could also point out the BFG's homily against the eating of the poor “piggy-wiggies” followed by his enormous plate of sausages and bacon at the palace, or the fact that no-one allegedly noticed that the giants ate children in the early chapters, but were quite aware in the later ones, especially with the bones being left underneath the dormitory windows. Everybody in the publishing world knows, however, that it is the editors' job to spot these inconsistencies, so perhaps the critics will direct their fire to these wretched individuals – particularly the ones at Puffin who also rejected the first volume of my splendid House of Fun series.
I hope in this brief essay to have dealt effectively with the many absurd allegations that have been made against one of Dahl's finest works; in particular that the novel contains unseemly amatory undertones. One really should not judge this great children's writer on the basis of what we know of his adult fiction, which is only, I believe, obsessed with sex and violence because Dahl naturally wrote what he believed would please his audience – just as Dahl simply had to mention the lovely calves of the footmen in The BFG to bring a wry smile to Her Majesty!
Living in Dahl's place of birth, Cardiff, I often cycle down to Roald Dahl Plass, the former Oval Basin of the docks, now a magnificent public space flanked by the Millenium Centre. Imagine my surprise one day, approaching this place of homage, to find myself confronted by a vast billboard adorned by none other than the real-life Sophie, now fully-grown in every sense, giant-sized and entirely naked, advertising a perfume bearing the name of a well-known Class A drug. Aha! I thought – so dreams are still bottled and dispensed by big friendly giants. What a marvellously appropriate legacy for the master of modern fantasy!