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A review by madeleinegeorge
Big Fish by Daniel Wallace
4.0
The spiritual inspiration for my Favorite Movie Of All Time, I now have my very own signed copy from Flyleaf, NC with a lovely note from Wallace as we both head into our London years.
Big Fish asks the questions we periodically, if reluctantly, must answer. What does it mean to miss a father you never truly knew? Is a life-time of grieving an absence really supplanted by the acute mourning for a presence? When one is consumed in the life-saving practice of a storied life, how do we protect that Truth from being consumed by what is real? Reaching for the soul and finding only fiction, how can we be convinced that reality has a place for us?
The bones of this story comprise the skeleton upon which I built my understanding of myself, wrote into being the compass by which I navigate my own incomprehensibilities, the strangerhood I find in myself. If I could, I would take another way home. But it remains Big Fish , as ever.
Essentials:
“It was as though he lived in a state of constant aspiration; getting there, wherever it was, wasn’t the important thing: it was the battle, and the battle after that, and the war was never ending.”
“Everything he did was without parallel. At home, the magic of his absence yielded to the ordinariness of his presence. [...] So he was not a good candidate for death. [...] He became just a man, a man without a job, without a story to tell, a man, I realized, I didn’t know.”
“Remembering a man’s stories makes him immortal, did you know that?”
“Beneath one facade there’s another facade and then another, and beneath that the aching dark place, his life, something that neither of us understands.”
“Regardless of how much he loved his wife, his son, he could only stand so much love.”
“We all have stories, just as you do. [...] Lots of stories, big and small. They all add up. Over a lifetime it all adds up. That’s why we’re here. We’re part of him, of who he is, just as he is a part of us. You still don’t understand, do you?”
Big Fish asks the questions we periodically, if reluctantly, must answer. What does it mean to miss a father you never truly knew? Is a life-time of grieving an absence really supplanted by the acute mourning for a presence? When one is consumed in the life-saving practice of a storied life, how do we protect that Truth from being consumed by what is real? Reaching for the soul and finding only fiction, how can we be convinced that reality has a place for us?
The bones of this story comprise the skeleton upon which I built my understanding of myself, wrote into being the compass by which I navigate my own incomprehensibilities, the strangerhood I find in myself. If I could, I would take another way home. But it remains Big Fish , as ever.
Essentials:
“It was as though he lived in a state of constant aspiration; getting there, wherever it was, wasn’t the important thing: it was the battle, and the battle after that, and the war was never ending.”
“Everything he did was without parallel. At home, the magic of his absence yielded to the ordinariness of his presence. [...] So he was not a good candidate for death. [...] He became just a man, a man without a job, without a story to tell, a man, I realized, I didn’t know.”
“Remembering a man’s stories makes him immortal, did you know that?”
“Beneath one facade there’s another facade and then another, and beneath that the aching dark place, his life, something that neither of us understands.”
“Regardless of how much he loved his wife, his son, he could only stand so much love.”
“We all have stories, just as you do. [...] Lots of stories, big and small. They all add up. Over a lifetime it all adds up. That’s why we’re here. We’re part of him, of who he is, just as he is a part of us. You still don’t understand, do you?”