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A review by beccabeccalee
Bambert's Book of Missing Stories by Reinhardt Jung
5.0
Like many of my favorite books, I found this by accident. My son was in the middle of pulling books off the shelves as I scoured the children's section for the right Dianna Wynne Jones book (they were all checked out). When I went to put the books back on the shelves, I found this among them. I think it was the muted, fanciful illustrations that caught my eye. Before I knew it, I was flipping through the two-page spreads and wondering what the book could be about. On impulse, I laid it on the stack of check-outs and brought it home.
The book begins with Bambert, a solitary man who suffers from dwarfism and lives in an apartment above a shop. His parents are both dead, and his impairment leaves him without much will or ability to leave his attic bedroom. He spends his time reading and concocting stories, and this proves a lonely comfort.
One day, in a poetic fit, he goes through his cache of stories and removes all mention of time and place from them. They must find their own settings, he says. He attaches each one to a balloon and releases them through his attic window. Each has a note of instruction: to send the story back with the name of the place where it was found.
At first, Bambert thinks his experiment has failed. Days and weeks pass and not a single story makes its way back to his tiny apartment. Then one day, along with his morning meal, the shopkeeper sends a sealed envelope upstairs on the dumb waiter. It's one of Bambert's stories, back from across the sea.
One by one, the stories return: from Russia, England, Beirut, Spain. Each story is distinct, though they bear the marks of the same melancholy world. There is sadness in them, cruelty, compassion, even love, and Bambert remarks on each one as they return to him.
Eventually, all that's left is Bambert's final story. But this one is nothing but four blank pages, sent into the world to write themselves.
Jung is an obvious craftsman, and these stories fall like carved gems, small and inviting, each one a different cut of the same stone. These are distilled stories, with barely more than a single rise and fall per tale. There's also a sophisticated pathos in this collection that somehow never dips into pity, despite Bambert's deteriorating health and wandering hopes. In sum, poetry.
The book begins with Bambert, a solitary man who suffers from dwarfism and lives in an apartment above a shop. His parents are both dead, and his impairment leaves him without much will or ability to leave his attic bedroom. He spends his time reading and concocting stories, and this proves a lonely comfort.
One day, in a poetic fit, he goes through his cache of stories and removes all mention of time and place from them. They must find their own settings, he says. He attaches each one to a balloon and releases them through his attic window. Each has a note of instruction: to send the story back with the name of the place where it was found.
At first, Bambert thinks his experiment has failed. Days and weeks pass and not a single story makes its way back to his tiny apartment. Then one day, along with his morning meal, the shopkeeper sends a sealed envelope upstairs on the dumb waiter. It's one of Bambert's stories, back from across the sea.
One by one, the stories return: from Russia, England, Beirut, Spain. Each story is distinct, though they bear the marks of the same melancholy world. There is sadness in them, cruelty, compassion, even love, and Bambert remarks on each one as they return to him.
Eventually, all that's left is Bambert's final story. But this one is nothing but four blank pages, sent into the world to write themselves.
Jung is an obvious craftsman, and these stories fall like carved gems, small and inviting, each one a different cut of the same stone. These are distilled stories, with barely more than a single rise and fall per tale. There's also a sophisticated pathos in this collection that somehow never dips into pity, despite Bambert's deteriorating health and wandering hopes. In sum, poetry.