I read Michael Ende’s famous novel, “Momo”. I knew this story when I watched a theatrical performance of this story by Shiki Theatrical Company in my youthful day. However, recently I have read the original novel. This story of fantasy is aimed to be read by children, but the timeless theme is common to elder people. It is a story what time means to anyone when one is stingy with it. Despite its appearance for saving time, the value of time is wasted by such a stinginess. The main character Momo has an intuition to grasp the essence of matters and playing with her makes everyone happy, in contrast to the stinginess that causes restless life on the people. Socio-politically this is an irony of the modern world. Literary-historically the place Momo lives, an ancient amphitheater symbolizes old-fashioned lives with comforts, where the lives of human beings were performed as a part of a play. Similar things happen in Ende’s another work, “Die unendliche Geschichte”, in which the main character becomes a part of the story he is reading and contributes to the story. Of course the lives of human beings is a mere part of the magnificent drama, in which nobody knows how it began and how it will end up. Every human being is just a character who appears for a moment in the drama. The realization that anybody is a part of this drama is common between “Momo” and “Die unendliche Geschichte”. The organization of the story is straightforward that children can understand easily, and the style is also sincere. The story silently invites the children to a world of metaphors. The expressions are not so radical.
From a viewpoint of structuralism, the story is well balanced and highly symmetric, so that children can easily follow it. There are not so much to see from post-structuralism or postmodernism. Momo, Meister Hora, Kassiopeia, die grauen Herren, all of the characters symbolize something important for the life.
Overall, the novel is an introduction that would remind something important for the idea of “time”, and is suitable for children and also adults who lost themselves in the stinginess of time.
