The Neverending Story
Neverending Story, The (Die unendliche Geschichte),a multi‐million‐selling fairy tale about the death of fairy tales. Much to the author Michael Ende's disgust, it has spawned three films (West Germany, 1984; Germany, 1989; and Germany, 1994). First published in West Germany in 1979, Ende's 428‐page novel became a cult book; it contains echoes of earlier writers—comprehensive mythology like Tolkien's, a talkative Carrollian giant tortoise, reader‐involvement such as that which Barrie invokes—but also enough originality for the novel to sell over a million copies in German alone, and go on to be translated into 27 other languages.
It tells two parallel stories which gradually interlock. Bastian Balthasar Bux, an anxious overweight German boy whose mother has recently died, takes refuge from bullies by hiding in a bookshop. There he finds...
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