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Title: The Night of Wishes
ISBN: 0374455031
Author:
Michael Ende
Publicate Date: 1995-04-17
Publish: 1995-04-17
List Price: $7.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $64.99
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $3.69
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Lovely
This book is thoroughly enchanting. I remember seeing the play on stage on New Year's Eve (my birthday and the day on which the story takes place) when I was a kid in Germany. Later, I read my sister's copy.
I just bought the English translation and read it with my husband, and I was very impressed with it. There is a good deal of rhyming going on in this book and the translators took great care to capture the feeling of them as well as preserve the rhyming structures.
What a great book!
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2: Clever, But Still Lacking
I fall into the same category of people who went searching for this book after reading the Neverending Story. It was on my Amazon wish list for months and months, but it was always too expensive to buy. Finally I saw it available for 16 bucks, so I got it. Was it worth the wait? You know, I'm not sure.
On one hand, the plot's clever and easy to understand, all the way from beginning to end. And I'm sure it's no small task to construct a plot that meets both criteria. But the characters seem so uninspired. You can read hundreds and hundreds of books about talking animals who save the day. The raven in this story has a bunch of wives and the cat wants to be a singer, but these character traits have nothing to do with the plot whatsoever. The raven could have been an aspiring juggler and the cat a gambling casino player, and it wouldn't have changed the plot a bit. And Father New Year is pretty much the most worthless literary character I've ever seen. Sure, he helps the heroes out, but GOSH he's got less inspiration behind him than an extra on a made for TV movie set.
Also there's an awful lot of witchery, and a bit of drunkness in the pages that (although quite amusing) makes me uncomfortable with its suitability for children, because it's definitely more of a children's book than a young adult book.
Other than the uninspired heros and the heavy emphasis on witchery, I can't say anything bad about the book. The translation is magnificent. The rhyming is wonderful. The bad guys ruining themselves in the end is hilarious. And the cold fire bowl is neat.
All in all, this book is a steady mixture of cleverness and blandness. So if you're like me, and you're looking for greatness, you're not going to find it in such a mixture. A Night of Wishes is a nice book to have because it's fairly obscure, but I wouldn't feel bad about telling anybody to pass it up.
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3: a fun, light read
I picked this book up because Neverending Story is one of my favorite books, probably my favorite fiction book, and I wanted to read more by Michael Ende. Whereas Neverending Story is very lengthy and full of heavy, complex themes, this book is light, fun, and enjoyable. For someone looking for a quick read with a simple plot and humorous characters, this would be a good book. Someone looking for something more along the lines of Neverending Story should probably look elsewhere.
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4: Terribly disappointing
The Neverending Story has always been one of my favorite books since I was young, and was really excited to read something else by Michael Ende. However, I found the book indredibly disappointing in comparison to the richness of Ende's imagination and character development in the Neverending Story. The plot falls flat, the conversation's boring and there's an overwhelming myopic sense of Christian self-righteousness that I found terribly disturbing. Maybe it's just the translation, but it doesn't feel like the same writer could've possibly done this at all.
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5: If you like the Addams Family, you'll like this.
Due to the particular flavor of dark humor which is abundantly used in the writing, this book feels like a cross between Roald Dahl's books and the Addams Family. Compared to Michael Ende's other books, this one is by far the funniest, the least frightening, and with the least philosophizing. (Which is to say, this book is still scarier and more philosophical than most fiction. But still funnier than most, too.)
It also has the best English translation of all his books... two people worked on it together, and they did a good job: you'd never guess it was in German. Poor guys, this book is thick with puns and rhymes and poems, and they made all of them work in English!
The entire story takes place between 5pm and Midnight of New Year's Eve. Instead of ellipses, clocks divide the paragraphs, showing how much time is left. I read a bit of it aloud and checked... it's written in real-time! It's so perfectly paced that you really could read it from 5 to 12 if you wanted to. How unique!
An evil sorceror (primarily a mad scientist) has discovered that he hasn't fulfilled his quota of wickedness for that year, which means the devil is finally coming to collect his soul. (Not in person, of cousre. The devil's a busy fellow these days.) As it turns out, his the witch who has been funding his experiments (who happens to be his aunt) comes to visit, and it turns out she has the same problem. They collaborate on a spell so dreadful that it can fulfill their entire remaining quota: a New Year's draught upon which all your wishes come true. However, their raven and cat (who are really spies from Nature) hear this and set out for their own last-minute dash to try and stop them.
The plot is good. No holes. Well-written ending. Excellent dialogue and characters. The story is metaphorical and meaningful in real life, but not to the startling extent of Momo or Neverending Story.
I'm not sure what audience this book is for. On the one hand, it appears to be a children's book, especially with the talking cat and raven being main characters. Then again, most of the book is about some bad guys making a hexed mixed drink, which I guess is acceptable fare for kids in Germany, but people in other places may find that inappropriate. Unlike Ende's other work, it seems to be very mainstream Christian in its worldset and worldview, with constant references to hell and heaven and so on, but the detailed descriptions of how the bad guys do their evil magic would doubtless make most mainstream Christians (the not-so-smart ones, anyway) shriek and burn the book. Everybody else would enjoy those bits, since the weird things that go into the drink are fun to read about.
It is with great astonishment that I realise Ende must have illustrated this book himself. The illustrations are fantastic, and contain a good part of the humor. They're very professional, stylized consistently, and well-textured. The charicaturizations feel natural, with no trace of the "I can't draw, but I'm illustrating this anyway!" look I would have expected. Apparently in the time between writing this and "Momo," Ende had taken it upon himself to become a really good illustrator. Is there anything this guy can't do?
All said, it's not my absolute favorite of Ende's books... it's still a tie between Neverending and Momo... I'm not sure what kind of people to recommend it to, aside from all people who are fanatics for Roald Dahl and Addams Family... but it's still a ton of fun, hysterical at many points, and better than quite a bit of other fiction.
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