Book Review: La Escuela de Magia

Book Review: La Escuela de Magia y Otros Cuentos

Author: Michael Ende

ISBN: 978-8434847330

Illustrations: full-color surrealist drawings by

Apology: The translation and edition I had is older than the one Amazon sells. I have not made time to dig for accurate information. I dug up a book review I'd written a few years ago and not posted, and pasted it in, with an eye on the clock.

This has been the kind of week you might wish on your enemy, if you have a serious enemy. Another visit to the timeless truth: "When you're reading about earthquakes here and famines there, and confronting a major problem in your own life, and your browser decides to crash, the bigger bad things on your mind do not put the browser crashing into perspective. We don't process unpleasantnesses in perspective. We process them in a cumulative fashion, so that when we're dealing with major unpleasantness in a healthy, mature, left-brain, almost emotion-free way, the browser crashing is the sort of thing that makes us scream words that are banned by this web site's contract."

None of the unpleasantness is the book'.s fault, however. It's a cheerful funny book written for adults to enjoy sharing to children. The idea seems to be that, as with Gulliver's Travels or Pilgrim's Progress, the adult mind can ponder the serious ideas for which the silly stories are metaphors.

The author of The Neverending Story was one of Europe’s best known writers. Probably more of his work deserved to be translated into English. The only other book of Ende’s that I’ve found in a language I can read, in real life, is this collection of five short, whimsical stories that were obviously written for an older audience than the large type and color pictures suggest. Amazon shows more. You can always use the giftcard widget at the bottom of the page to send me books or giftcards.

These stories are not quite science fiction. They are speculative fiction, in which each story explores an idea. The title story, set in the mythical kingdom of Desideria, explores the “magical thinking” of New Age humanist psychology, where if your mind can conceive it and you can make yourself believe it, you can achieve it...so what happens when two students who want to visualize the same thing into being “see” different mental pictures? In another story, an explorer searching for the mythical country called Absurdistan meets the man everyone talks to but no one remembers, and then the man everyone remembers but no one is aware of having talked to, and one of them—if there are two of them—steals his wallet.

Another story is so realistic one suspects it must actually have happened, somewhere. After inadvertently having hurt a child’s feelings by mistaking her self-portrait for a picture of the Easter Bunny, a kind adult dares to suggest only painting more things into the picture...until the child adds dark curtains that blot out the whole picture.

The other two stories fit somewhere between these levels of realism and surrealism. To preserve suspense, all I’ll say about them is that one of them is narrated in such an offbeat yet deadpan way that it kept me guessing up to the last paragraph.

This is such a short, easy-to-read collection that readers whose native language isn’t Spanish shouldn’t even mind having to look up a word or two.