The Neverending Story

by Michael Ende. Translated by Ralph Manheim.


This story is one that I fear gets overlooked because of people's memories of the movie that came out oh so long ago. I passed it in the library last week and decided to check it out again. I hadn't read it for about 13 years. I was worried it might not live up to my expectations, but it did! This story is every bit as good as I remembered, which is a relief! The book is 27 chapters long, and the first chapter is really a sort of prologue. The first letter of the first word of each chapter is gigantic and made into a picture, just like with old-fashioned story books, and the second chapter's letter is 'A' and the very last chapter's letter is 'Z' which is kind of fun.

Also, I would like to say that the very first Neverending Story film ends after the chapter beginning with 'L' and the second movie is pretty much made up and doesn't resemble the second half of the book at all. Also, I seem to remember being scared of a wolf in the movie when I was younger. That wolf is barely a character in the book at all. That is how much the films are edited-down/altered versions of the story. Of course the book is better---it always is.

Bastian Balthazar Bax stumbles into a bookstore one day and sees a book called the Neverending Story. He spontaneously steals the book, and is so overcome with shame about it that he decides he can't ever go home and face his father. Instead he hides in the school attic, and spends the rest of the day reading. The more he reads the later in the day it gets, and the more engrossed he becomes. The crux comes when he realizes that his story is part of the story he's reading, and unless he makes an important decision the two stories are destined to continually repeat themselves, over and over, in a type of Groundhog Day phenomenon. Bastian makes a hard decision, and soon finds that his life will never be the same again.