It's a slow, overdone, meander through a fairly arbitrary world and the 8 year old I was reading it to (we finished the book on her 9th birthday) was, like me, less than gripped.

The pacing is ok, the imagination great - chaotic, but good.įor me Ende should have stopped there and wrapped it up. That first half is cleverly done with a good idea about binding the reader and the adventure together in a 'meta' way that works out really well. The book seems to reach the end of the film by about half way through. I saw the film around the time it came out years ago. And perhaps the translator could have used somewhat more straightforward language for the children at whom the book is primarily aimed. But it felt as if in some places every other line was of this nature. Kids don't have to know every word - that's part of the learning process, through literary osmosis they'll absorb the meaning.

I'm not one for dumbing down, but this goes the other way pointlessly.Īn example would be: 'Consequently consternation ensued.' The translator has consistently reached for the most complicated/high falutin' word available and as a result the child's book ends up unreadable/incomprehensible to many modern kids. A very mixed bag.įirst off I should say that although the book was written in 1979 it reads as though it were written in 1939. Michael Ende's works have been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 20 million copies, and have been adapted into motion pictures, stage plays, operas and audio books. Other books include Momo and Jim Knopf und Lukas der Lokomotivführer (Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver). He was interested in and influenced by anthroposophy.ĭie unendliche Geschichte (The Neverending Story) is Ende's best known work. The reader is often invited to take a more interactive role in the story, and the worlds in his books often mirror our reality, using fantasy to bring light to the problems of an increasingly technological modern society.Įnde was also known as a proponent of economic reform, and claimed to have had the concept of aging money in mind when writing Momo. Ende’s writing could be described as a surreal mixture of reality and fantasy. Ende claimed, 'It is for this child in me, and in all of us, that I tell my stories,' and that ' for any child between 80 and 8 years' (qtd. However, Ende was not strictly a children’s author, as he also wrote books for adults. He was the son of the surrealist painter Edgar Ende.Įnde was one of the most popular and famous German authors of the 20th century, mostly due to the enormous success of his children's books. Michael Andreas Helmuth Ende was a German writer of fantasy and children's literature.

The neverending story book series