Book Recommendation: It's Better Than the Movie (Spoilers)
Most of us remember the 1980s movie with what looked like a giant flying dog when we think of The Neverending Story. I vaguely remember seeing the film as a kid and cataloging it away in the 80s memorabilia of my mind.
I only discovered the book in 2014 and learned that the author, Michael Ende, was inspired by his father, Edgar Ende's Surrealist paintings. I was intrigued by the paintings depicting dream-like scenes with angels, faceless men, corpses surrounded by umbrellas, and giant bird wings emerging from hills of sand.
In one, a line of naked, faceless men wait, hammers in hand, as if to drive nails into a distant figure at the end of a hall mounted on a crucifix.
The paintings have that terror-wonder quality of dreams where the mundane meets the horrific or the wondrous. We are swimming on the surface and plunging to the depths of our minds.
Mainly out of fascination for the paintings, I ordered the book.
I expected a more fleshed-out version of the film I remembered seeing as a child. A boy discovers a book, The Never Ending Story; he is pulled into the book to help the hero of the story save the land and the child princess that rules it. To save the world, the boy must confirm his beliefs and say the princess's name.
The story I discovered was much better and quite different.
On the surface, it is a children's story where, yes, a boy, Bastian, an overweight, lonely, heartbroken boy, steals a book and hides himself away in the school's attic to lose himself in the book.
The story he discovers is lovely and horrific, just like the stuff of dreams - a magical land with wonderous creatures, myths, and legends disappearing into nothingness.
The nothingness appears in patches. Places and creatures slowly vanish; worse, those around it are drawn to it and even start to march toward the void, drawn to it and their unmaking in some perverse way.
It takes a child to save the world. Two children, really. A hero and the boy who entered the story. The two need to believe in the world and reimagine it to stop it from disappearing.
Along the way, Bastian rides the heady wave of being the story's creator, reimagining himself as a handsome prince, the strongest and the fastest in all the land. He discovers that with each wish he makes, the world changes according to his whim, but with each wish, he travels further from his true self and loses his memories of the real world.
By the end, Bastian only remembers his name, a precious piece of information he must hold onto to return home. He must remember someone from the world he wants to return to but has lost all his memories. He struggles to remember his father while unearthing delicate paintings in an underground mine, each so fragile that the slightest touch will disintegrate it.
I found this book when I was extremely sleep-deprived and going through post-partum depression. It made more sense to me than the real world at the time. I highly recommend it to anyone going through a difficult time who believes in the healing power of stories and the imagination.