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 'The Labyrinth of Dreaming Books' by Walter Moers

The Labyrinth of Dreaming books is a fictional novel by Walter Moers, which was written in German and published in 2011. The English version got translated and published in 2012. As in the earlier novels which are situated on Zamonia, W. Moers pretends to just function as a German translator for the Zamonian author Optimus Yarnspinner. Moers describes the novel ‘the Labyrinth of Dreaming Books’ as one book of a series of novels which contains his 10.000 page-long autobiography called ‘reminiscences of the journeys of an old dinosaur’.

Content of the book

This book tells the story of Yarnspinners return to Bookholm and is, in this sense, the sequel to ‘the City of Dreaming Books’. In contrast to the first novel, ‘The Labyrinth of Dreaming Books’ is not a completed story but ends with a cliffhanger. In the postscript Moers explains that the novel wasn’t finished in time and would be released in two parts. The date of release of the third book ‘The Castle of Dreaming Books’ was reannounced multiple times and postponed indefinitely in July 2015.

200 years later – the storyline

Over 200 years have passed since Optimus Yarnspinner traveled to Bookholm and experienced adventures, which are described in ‘The City of Dreaming Books’. Since then, he lives in the Lindworm Castle as an aspired author. He created a habit of reading some letters of the extensive mails of his admirers every morning. In the morning, when the story begins, Yarnspinner finds a manuscript in one of the letters, which describes the horror vacui of a writer, the fear of lacking ideas. In contrast to a previous text of similar content, which made Yarnspinner go to Bookholm 200 years ago, this text is of a disturbingly bad literary quality. Yarnspinner is horrified when he realizes that this is a perfect copy of his own style, even the signature and handwriting is indistinguishable. The letter ends with the note, that the shadow king has returned.