There are stories and there are lies and they are different

Rating: 10/10 (28 December 2005)

Big Fish is about a man who tells stories. He does not utter untruths with the deliberate intent to deceive, he merely embellishes what is already there to make it more interesting. His son (and some reviewers) does not understand this. The story about Edward Bloom is told by himself, in the form of his stories rather than as a straightforward narrative of his life. There have been lots of traveling salesmen who have mad a middling success of their lives. The world is full of their grandchildren who do not even know their full names, much less anything interesting. My grandfather was on the first trip an electric car took the length of the state of Connecticut when he was 20. Not much there. My grandfather was a charter member of the American Automobile Association, known as the AAA. Back in the early days AAA members would survey routes and contribute their notes to the AAA travel books. And thus a story begins. Beats hell out of that other one-sentence narrative, and it is not a lie, it has decorative flourishes. And that's what Edward Bloom was about and that is what his son learns about his father who was loved by many more people than he suspected.