Bambert's Book of Missing Stories [Illustrated] [Paperback]

This whimsical curiosity of a book will appeal more to a particular mindset than an age-group. Billed as suitable for ten years and up, it is an imaginative, bitter-sweet story of a handicapped man, Bambert, trapped in his upstairs quarters by the fear of people's laughter. Beneath him lives Mr Bloom, a grocer, who sends up his orders in a lift and keeps a fond eye on the strange old man. But as the characters are as unrealistic as those in Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince, there is a childishness and other-worldliness about the whole story which gives it a lightness and allows the imagination to float away. Isolated from real people, Bambert creates his own characters in stories which he wishes were in some way real. He decides to send each story off in a miniature hot-air balloon on the night breezes, with a letter, asking whoever finds them to post them back. From the postmark, he can find out where to place each story, what nationality his main character must be, and fill in the blanks. In this way, the stories take part in their own creation, find their own place in the world and become a part of reality. They come back to him from Ireland, Spain, Moscow, Venice and various places in France. Those which never make it past the garden are rescued by Mr Bloom, who raids his own stamp collection, lifting the postmark with a boiled egg, and printing it on an envelope, to return the stories to Bambert without spoiling his dream. The sweetness of Bambert's hopeful idea and his neighbour's kindness are offset by the stories themselves, which, although lightly written, are strange and dark in content. In one a child and her parents make a trip to the beach and for a short while they lose each other in the dunes. When the parents find their daughter again, she is busy fitting together the dismembered parts of plastic dolls, which are strewn all around her. At her insistence, they fit together every one of 43 dolls and take them all home. For Bambert, these dismembered dolls are the children he never had, made whole. Disquieting yet sweet, this novel defies categorizing. (Kirkus UK)

Jung explores the power of stories to free writers'-and by extension, their readers'-imaginations from physical limitations in this brief, introspective import. Reclusive Bambert feels trapped in his dwarf's body, but finds solace in stories he writes: about a boy who encounters a dying whale, a wise princess who will marry only the one who brings her the key to truth, a group of poets and philosophers who escape prison with the help of a sunbeam, and seven others, each distinct in type and tone. Acting one day on an urge to give them validity by letting them find their own settings, he sends them, plus four blank pages, flying off under balloons labeled with his return address. All eventually come back, bearing stamps from Spain, Russia, and other distant lands. Unknown to Bambert, however, his tales haven't actually gone that far; the stamps come from a kind old man who collects his mail, and who fills those blank pages himself, with a poignant final story in which Bambert, who is actually dying, goes to meet his beloved characters. The audience for this meditation on what stories are, and do, is likely to be deep but not wide. (Fiction. 12-15) (Kirkus Reviews)

Bambert is a recluse. He feels out of place in the world and lives in the top of his house, while the grocer downstairs, Mr Bloom, supplies all the provisions he needs. Bambert has completed ten stories for his Book of Wishes, and one day decides the stories should go and seek their own settings. Parcelling up each one, and sending it out into the world attached to Japanese hot-air balloon powered by nightlights, Bambert also includes an eleventh story, consisting only of four sheets of blank paper, which he hopes will write themselves. As the stories begin to return, with foreign stamps and the names of people who have found them, Bambert begins to reassemble his Book of Wishes, now filled with tales from around the world. There is, for example, a rather sinister tale about waxworks from England, the tale of a boy whose drawings come true, and a miraculous escape from a dungeon in Tsarist Russia. One night, Bambert finds the eleventh story. It did not fly anywhere, but stuck to his roof. Bambert falls to his death while trying to reach it, and never knows that Mr Bloom faked all the envelopes from his stamp collection. Saddened when his friend dies, Mr Bloom rescues the eleventh envelope and writes the last story, about Bambert's arrival on 'the other side of the dream', where he's reunited with all the characters he brought to life.