Princess Insomnia & the nightmare nightmare

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Princess Insomnia & the nightmare-colored Nachtmahr is a novel by Walter Moers from 2017, which is set on the fictional continent of Zamonia . It is the first Zamonien novel that was not illustrated by the author himself, but by Lydia Rode . The book is about Princess Dylia, who suffers from a mysterious illness that leads to insomnia, and her travel companion, the nightmare Havarius Opal. Similar to the novels Ensel and Krete and Der Schrecksenmeister , Walter Moers states that he only translated the book written by Hildegunst von Mythenmetz from Zamonian.

content

The book begins with a detailed characterization of the princess, her living conditions and her mysterious illness, which leads to weeks of insomnia. Further symptoms are that her senses become extremely sharpened and she perceives things that remain invisible to everyone else. During the night, when all the residents of the castle in which she lives are asleep, she looks for suitable activities. So she comes up with more and more creative methods to spend the extra time, such as inventing and exploring new words and self-created fantasy worlds.
One night she meets the night mare Havarius Opal, who she apparently tries to kill by sitting on her chest. In the following conversation he tries to convince the princess that he will inevitably drive her insane and ultimately into death, because this is his destiny as a nightmare. He assures her that the quick route to death would be the best for her and that any resistance would only mean that it will haunt her until she finally kills herself, driven into insane. Since she defends herself, however, the night mare takes Dylia on a journey to the amygdala , the part of her brain that is responsible for generating the feeling of fear.
On this journey, the duo experienced a wide variety of events and dangers. The intentions and the true personality of Nachtmahr, who describes himself as immortal and an expert in the 'Nachtmahr business', are still characterized, but remain questionable and unexplained until the end. At the same time, they come several times in situations in which Dylia even rescues him from otherwise hopeless situations, sometimes with the help of the well-meaning twilight dwarfs.
At the end of their journey, they reach their destination amygdala. Once there, the nightmare tries to lure the princess into the dark heart of the night , the quickest way into madness. With broken resistance, she abandons herself to the grillos , the inhabitants of amygdala, in order to be carried into the dark center of the city by them. At the last moment Havarius Opal changes his mind, pulls the princess out of the danger zone and shows her an escape route through which they can get back to reality. Dylia wakes up in her bedroom, where the nightmare is already waiting for her in the next room. It has been mentioned several times throughout the book that it is impossible to get rid of a Nachtmahr until it has achieved its goal of driving its victim insane and subsequent death, with one exception. The victim has to get the nightmare to meet himself and ask to leave. While he continues to work to make the princess crazy, she manages with a trick that he says the sentence Oh, get away from me! says while looking in a mirror. When he realizes this, he throws himself out the window and shatters into a thousand pieces.
The book ends with Dylia, whose hobby is interesting words, mostly foreign words, now after a long search finds her personal superordinate word (or favorite word ), her own name.

style

The novel is described by the author as a somnambulistic fairy tale , so it can be sorted into the series of art fairy tales with the Schrecksenmeister and Ensel and Krete. The book ends with the death of the antagonist and thus the rescue of the heroine. Moers describes such a happy ending in his previous novels as untypical for Zamonian literature.
In Princess Insomnia, Walter Moers again works heavily with different types of puns, such as neologisms and anagrams . The clearest and most striking is the name of the princess, Dylia, as an anagram to the first name of the illustrator Lydia Rode.
The book is divided into 18 chapters, which are headed with Latin ordinal numbers.
The illustrations are watercolors , which are colored throughout.

background

After Walter Moers had published the book The Labyrinth of Dreaming Books in 2011 , he also announced the third part of the trilogy. However, he had to postpone the release date several times due to work on other projects. In the meantime, he announced the graphic novel for The City of Dreaming Books , which appeared in two parts in November 2017 and January 2018, and the novel The Island of 1000 Lighthouses . The latter, however, was also postponed as he began working on Princess Insomnia & the Nightmare Nightmare through contact with Lydia Rode.
For Lydia Rode, this is her first publication. She has suffered from chronic fatigue or exhaustion syndrome , which leads to insomnia, since she was seventeen . She made contact with Moers on her own initiative. This gave rise to the idea of ​​a collaboration and later a novel. In the afterword, Walter Moers describes that Lydia Rode and her illness served as inspiration for the novel, although it should not be about the effects of the illness, but rather the power of creativity.

reception

The book was in the top 10 of the Spiegel bestseller list for seven weeks, with a top spot at number two in its second week. It was received very controversially by the critics (and fans), a major point of criticism for many was that the drawings did not come from Moers personally.

The audio book read by Andreas Fröhlich won the German Audio Book Prize 2018, the illustrations by Lydia Rode were awarded the German Fantastik Prize in October 2018 .

literature

Text output

  • Princess Insomnia & the nightmare nightmare . Albrecht Knaus, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3813507850 . Hardback edition.
  • Princess Insomnia & the nightmare nightmare . Penguin, Munich 2018, ISBN 978-3328103349 . Paperback.

Audio book

Web links

Homepage of Princess Insomnia and the Nightmare Nightmare on the author's website , last accessed on September 9, 2018.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.zamonien.de/autor.php , accessed on September 10, 2018
  2. ^ Archive of Buchreport , accessed on September 10, 2018
  3. ↑ freizeithelden.de , accessed on September 10, 2018
  4. ^ Spiegel online , article from September 1, 2017
  5. ^ Website of the German Audiobook Prize , accessed on September 10, 2018
  6. ↑ The winners of the German Fantastic Prize 2018. In: Homepage of the German Fantastic Prize. Retrieved October 25, 2018 .