Book Review: La Historia Interminable

Title: La Historia Interminable (Die Unendliche Geschichte)

(Wow, those collector prices! A newer edition is available; if you don't specify the first Spanish edition here, and do want the Spanish edition, you'll get the new one. The picture shows the book I physically read.)

Author: Michael Ende

Translator: Miguel Saenz

Date: 1979 (German), 1989 (Spanish)

Publisher: Alfaguara (Spanish)

ISBN: 84-204-2522-2

Length: 419 pages

Illustrations: line drawings by Roswitha Quadflieg

Quote: “Me gustaría saber qué pasa realmente en un libro cuando está cerrado.”

There’s an English edition of DieUnendliche Geschichte, too, called TheNeverending Story; it sold well while the movie was in theatres. I checked it out of the library at the time. What I own is the Spanish edition. My comments apply, I think, to both English and Spanish editions. I don’t read German.

So, the verdict: When I expected this story to be as good as TheEverlasting Story of Nory, e.g., I was disappointed. When I identified and acknowledged its worst defect, I was able to enjoy it.

At 419 pages La Historia Interminable may really seem interminable—especially after you notice that, despite appearances, it’s not a classic fantasy novel. It’s speculative fiction, yes, but it’s based in twentieth century psychology. This is a story about the strange, morbid fear of fantasy that dominated Europe and North America in the early twentieth century.

Classic schizophrenia is genetic, linked to a combination of several different genes. (Yes, the celiac gene is part of the mix; most schizophrenics are not celiacs and most celiacs are not schizophrenics, but the incidence of schizophrenia has been estimated to be three times as high in the celiac population as it is in the gluten-tolerant population. No worries, Nephews. The rest of those genes have not been recorded in our family.) Symptoms worsen over a patient’s lifetime but are obvious, if they’re going to develop at all, before age thirty. Some schizophrenics whose symptoms are mild are able to recognize their delusions and live relatively normal lives. What these rare best-case schizophrenics tell us is that maintaining a focus on external reality seems to help them focus on using the healthier parts of their brains.

As a result, in the early twentieth century, a lot of people inferred from the schizophrenics’ testimony that we’d all be saner if we stamped out all traces of imagination, including any taste for fiction. Fantasy stories, especially, were supposed to be indignantly rejected as “too babyish” for anyone over age six. Serious scientists warned parents that indulging any taste (children’s or their own) for fantasy, science fiction, speculation, or any kind of “escape” reading was likely to lure us into a fantasy world from which we might be unable to escape. S.I. McMillen, particularly, warned that his worst-case schizophrenic patient had been a sensitive, imaginative, shy child, and suspected—I think he sincerely believed—that it was her parents’ failure to force this child to join after-school groups and play sports that caused her to become catatonic in college.

This, we now know, is not true. Bruno Bettelheim observed in the 1940s, and documented during the middle of the century, that in fact the ability to imagine a better world helped people cope with horrific conditions (i.e. prison camps during the war) and helped people make improvements in the real world, whether by fantasizing about more efficient forms of technology or about better social relationships. Whether daydreaming is productive or not depends on who is daydreaming, how, and when, but neither daydreaming nor writing fantasy novels makes people schizophrenic. Still, Michael Ende grew up with a vocation to write novels and a large number of elders warning him that if he spent too much time in a fantasy world he’d never be able to come out. Die Unendliche Geschichte was at least an interesting fantasy about this misbelief.

The “Neverending Story” begins with Bastian, a little fat boy, hiding from bullies, stealing a book from the local bookstore, and hiding in an attic to read the novel about the brave hunter Atreyu, whose complexion is not “Red” but olive green, and his quest for a Savior from the World of Human Beings who can restore the Empress of Fantasia to health by giving her a new name. When Bastian thinks of a name for her and says it aloud, he finds himself inside the fantasy, redesigning the landscape and rearranging its population as he goes along.

Bastian, unfortunately, is not a professional writer. His stories are all about a not very imaginative, greedy, selfish little boy, and they’re so boring and self-aggrandizing that readers may lose interest. He wants to be not only the Savior and the Strongest Hero but also the Wisest Writer, and so on, and so forth. Perhaps it’s meant to be his one redeeming feature, in the long, long middle passage of this novel, that his fantasies aren’t all about food.

Then he makes his way to the City of the Ancient Emperors, where the souls of humans who stayed in Fantasia too long lose all their memories and spend eternity turning up random letters, while a snarky monkey watches to see whether they’ll ever turn up enough words to make a book.

The story will, of course, have a happy ending...but its final third leaves me cold. Ende seems to have consciously decided to ignore the moral issues Bastian’s selfishness raises, and rely instead on images taken straight from the psychoanalytic process.

So...it’s not Alice in Wonderland, or Gulliver’s Travels, or The Arabian Nights. Possibly because it shares the same fear of fantasy, as well as because I read it (most attentively) in the same language, La Historia Interminable seems most especially inferior to Don Quixote. I suspect that it won’t appeal to many people who appreciate Tolkien, or C.S. Lewis, or even Piers Anthony...(Anne McCaffrey? Maybe. A “lucky” white dragon flies heroically through the book and bonds with Bastian.)

Even in Susan Cooper’s fantasies, careful as those are to distinguish between “Light” and “Dark” as sides in an alien political struggle rather than human “good” and “evil,” the characters have a solid moral sense of why one is “the right side” and one is “the wrong side” for humans. Ende is, like Cooper, post-Christian, struggling heroically to express a valid moral system that would be different from the Christian system. Nobody is allowed to mention that Bastian is a glutton and his gluttony is self-destructive, although his story can be summarized that way. Nobody ever suggests that Bastian might do better to think about something other than me-me-me-and-my-little-feelings.We have to have faith that spending time with a motherly lady, who says a lot of things psychoanalysts say, will mysteriously prompt Bastian to spare a little thought for his father.

Some minor characters in La Historia Interminable are the ayayai, literally woe-woe-woe, animals that look like particularly large unappealing grubs but that have enough in the way of minds to bewail their own repulsiveness. For much of the book Bastian’s character  is uglier than the ayayai. Possibly Ende’s purpose was to say to normal adolescents, who may be in the awkward selfconscious stage of adolescence but are probably nicer than Bastian, “If there’s hope for this horrid little grub of a boy, there’s hope for you.” How effectively he says that, perhaps teenagers may judge better than adults.

In any case, given its deliberate refusal to be the fantasy epic its packaging suggests—this is not The Hobbit or Watership Down or Haroun andthe Sea of Stories, and if you want a fantasy about Jungian psychology I can think of no reason not to prefer Nancy Springer’s—La Historia Interminable is well enough written to be a good long light read. Fantasia is no less a charming fantasy world because its author thinks it’s a generic fantasy world. Some of the characters are not merely stick figures but popsicle stick figures. Others are unusual and appealing. This is not a great book but it's an unusual, amusing one.

If you're not attached to a specific edition, either La Historia Interminable or The Neverending Story can be ordered from this web site for $5 per book, $5 per package, plus $1 per online payment, and both books plus at least two more of similar size would fit into one $5 package. Both versions have been reprinted in several editions, some of which are ridiculously expensive collectors' books by now. German editions are hard to find in the U.S. and all seem to be outrageously expensive, although, perhaps for that reason, Amazon is currently offering an audio-file version of the original German free with "trials" of Amazon's Audible Audiobook software.