Momo (novel)

Momo is a children's novel written by Michael Ende, published in 1973 and subtitled The Knights in Grey or The Men of grey. The full title in German is Momo oder Die seltsame Geschichte von den Zeit-Dieben und von dem Kind, das den Menschen die gestohlene Zeit zurückbrachte (Momo, or the strange story of the thieves of time and the girl who returned time to men). It deals with the concept of time and how it is used by humans in modern societies. The antagonists are the so-called "grey men", some strange individuals who represent the Bank of Time and promote the idea of saving time among the population to the entire city. Under its influence, life becomes sterile, you stop doing everything that is considered a waste of time, such as art, imagination or even sleep. Buildings and clothes are made exactly the same for everyone and the pace of life becomes hectic. Actually, the more time a person saves, the less he has: the gray men consume it in the form of cigars, made from the dried petals of the hour flowers that represent time. Without those cigars, the men in gray cannot exist.

Momo, due to her special personality, becomes an obstacle to the Time Bank's plans. The gray men try unsuccessfully to get rid of her. Momo, together with the Casiopea turtle (who communicates with her thanks to the luminous messages from her shell) will face the dictatorship of the gray men and end them. To do this, she Momo must go to the same spring of time and thus return time to everyone.

Main idea

Momo

The main idea of Momo can be understood as a critique of consumerism. It shows the danger of being seduced by the hidden interests of companies that have enough power to influence people's lifestyles. In the same sense, it is also a profound criticism of the rational model of conceiving time, an economic model that forgets those small moments and sensations that, without having economic value and therefore may seem superfluous, are really important in human life, which always has a spiritual aspect.^{[citation required]}

Characters

Momo

She is an orphaned girl who has the amazing ability to listen very well, has many friends and lives in the ruins of an old amphitheater. For grey men, it poses a great danger, so try to get rid of it. He was in an orphanage and ran away from him. It was seen alone and abandoned for the first time when a group of visitors passed through the amphitheater. Those visitors immediately made their friends and helped him. Thanks to Casiopea, he arrives twice to the house of Master Hora, who gives him advice and explains to him who are the gray men. Momo is the girl who, according to the novel, saved the time of all men and with it, saved the humanity of the grey men. He's always barefoot and wearing a big card.

Beppo Barrendero

He is a quiet and paused man, slow to even speak: sometimes it takes days to respond, which makes many people think he's a little crazy. Just reflect well what he says, live his time slower than the rest. The art of patience makes it very wise in the background. He does his sweep job very well and he doesn't despair when he sweeps. When Momo disappears, the grey men make him believe they have her kidnapped and that he has to pay a ransom with 100,000 hours of time. Shame, fear overcomes him. Corralted and deceived, he ends up working fast and carelessly at all hours to try to pay the huge ransom, just stopping to eat and rest a few seconds. During Momo's flight through the paralyzed city, he finds him petrified, with the sloppy beard and notorious oars. So, Momo understands the real weight of what he has to do. When it all ends, they'll meet at last.

Gigi Cicerone

His real name is Girolamo. Along with Beppo Barrendero, they're Momo's best friends. It's a storyteller, who invents his own stories. After Momo's disappearance (for a year), grey men make him famous for his stories. At first, everything's fine, but over time it stops having imagination. However, that does not prevent him from continuing, doing something he had never done: telling stories that were intended only for Momo. After narrating the last one he had, Gigi feels he's empty inside, so he started repeating them. But none of that seems to affect his fame. One day he decides to use his influence to tell the whole story of the grey men, who immediately threaten to take away all fame. Scared, Gigi resigns and continues to betray his principles. Momo visits him one day and Gigi, in haste, asks him to stay with him, so he can make new stories again, but Momo understands that this is not the way and lets him go.

Children

Paolo, Massimo, Blanco, Claudio, the girl Mary and her brother Dedé, are some of the children who go to the amphitheater where Momo is to play. They play inventing adventure stories so they go to the amphitheater, as there thanks to Momo's presence her imagination improves considerably.

The gray men

The gray men are "persons" (in the book it is understood that they are really nothing, they only have human form) that try, and they get, to make humans save time to keep them even though, in reality, the time humans save is lost time, since the gray men steal it and live from it, for so to speak, they are crazy for the time and they need everything they can. Their enemies are children, who do not understand time or business and, especially Momo, who makes humans waste time, because he hears their problems and that can take a long time. A grey man tries to deter her with a full wrist, with models, friends, family and boyfriends. However, Momo can't listen to it and replicates that the wrist can't love it. That is when man tells him his true purpose with his true voice: they want to get rid of it. As a result, that gray man is adjusted and punished by others. His greatest enemy is undoubtedly Master Time: the time manager of all men. His goal is to reach him to get all the time of all men. To achieve this, they try to employ Momo. Grey men cannot enter Hora's house.
The gray men, to survive, steal the hourly flowers (which they represent at the time), freeze them with their cold, pluck the petals and smoke them, making it only so in dead time, of which they live. In fact, if by mistake or intentionally, the cigarette loses contact with its mouth, they get rid of nothing.

Casiopea

It's Master Hora's turtle. It is a normal and current turtle except because it is able to communicate by making forms of letters in its shell. He is also able to know what will happen half an hour in advance, but not what will happen until then. As she herself says, she cannot change the future, just knowing it beforehand. As they flee through the city of grey men, Momo and Casiopea avoid them thanks to the fact that the turtle knows where the thieves will not be half an hour in advance to dodge them. So you will also know that both will separate at a time of persecution, even if you cannot avoid it. He also knows that they will meet again later, so Momo keeps running smoothly, hoping to find her again.

Master Time

He's in charge of managing time for men. Send Casiopea to look for Momo to save her from gray men and teach her the concept of time. In Momo's second visit, he decided to stop giving time to men so that the world would stop and the grey men would stay out of time, making Momo's task easier, which is to look for and find the place where the grey men keep their time, with an hour flower to survive and not stand like the other humans. However, Hora cannot take time away from the grey men. He lives in the house of No Part of Never Street.

Accommodations

• Momo (1986), film directed by Johannes Schaaf
• Momo, an adventure to counterreloj (2001), animated film directed by Enzo D'Alò
• Momo (2003), animated series led by Cohem Burke and Colum Burke
• Legend of Raana (2014), animated mini-series directed by Majid Ahmady