Advent Calendar: Day 22

By Circe -

If you were a child in the 1980s, your parents were pretty much required by law to show you several movies: The Princess Bride, The Goonies, Labyrinth, and The Neverending Story. These movies are all surprisingly weird if you think about them too long, which I do not recommend doing whilst sober. The Princess Bride has Peter Falk reading to Fred Savage in a frame story that exists solely because of the conceit of the original book, The Goonies is pretty much an indexed list of "things that look awesome but you should never try to recreate in real life", and Labyrinth featured David Bowie, or more accurately, David Bowie's gratuitous leggings.

The Neverending Story is weird. Just weird. I have no idea why all of our parents thought it was a good idea to let us watch that. I am here to tell you, in total honesty, that the book makes the movie seem totally normal and not at all like someone accidentally used a sheet of blotter acid as a filter in the breakroom coffee machine. 

I own a first-edition hardcover in library binding. It's pretty awesome.

The author, Michael Ende, had a penchant for making his books, in addition to being full of brain-destroying dream logic, a tiny bit literally, physically strange. All of Bastian's parts in the real world are printed in black, and all of Atreyu's adventures in the fantasy world are inked in green. The book begins with a description of the bookstore the titular volume is in, from the point of view of the grumpy proprietor, and because it is his POV, the text on the window is printed in mirror-reverse, as he would see it from inside. Each chapter begins with a full-page illuminated capital letter, and they are in alphabetical order.

I have no idea if the English translation does it justice. My copy is in German, and believe me, it's weird enough.

Ende's proclivities for faffing with the ink itself spill over into his other books, which are sadly less famous outside of Germany. He wrote a lot of "children's" literature that combines the surreal logic of Roald Dahl with the crepuscular air of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The other one I own, Momo, is about mysterious creatures that steal time from an entire village, and is printed entirely in chocolate brown. Why brown? No idea!

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