Hermann Hesse

The Journey To The East
$14.99
Hesse's Journey to the East - to my mind - is a thematic twin of Kundera's Book of Laughing and Forgetting. For me, it is a treatise on memory. Post-modern in its recursive self-referencing, it is also an epistemological manifesto as to what can be known.

Pavel Somov, Ph.D., author of "Eating the Moment: 141 Mindful Practices to Overcome Overeating One Meal at a Time" (New Harbinger, 2008)
www.eatingthemoment.com
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Demian
$15.00
Indeed a great read! A coming of age story in existential prose and sensibilities. I have made it a point to read at least 3 great novels every year. I'm a nutrition and exercise practitioner functioning within an evolutionary context, so I tend to read literature related to my work---nutrition, rehab, exercise, biology and anthropology. My 3 or 4 books of fiction are to feed my soul and to reconnect with my humanistic past (I have degrees in Philosophy and Religion as I wanted to be a professor years ago). In 2009 this was the first literary work I read and it was such a joy. It's short read and gets right to it. It definitely has a strong autobiographical current (a kind of existential catharsis), which in some ways makes it more compelling in the virtues it extols. I love books about journeys of the spirit and this is a classic. It contains a strong moral character without being obnoxiously ideological. Quite the contrary, it contains a rich soulful taste.

Beneath the Wheel
$14.00
Hesse wrote a very short autobiography in his later years, which can be found on the web. In this minute memoir, Hesse lists the works which he feels best represent him. "Beneath the Wheel" is not among them. My perception of this second novel of Hesse's is that the artistic merits of this work are limited by a personal desire on the part of the author to assign blame. While there is no doubt validity to Hesse's expose of various authority figures as being willing to sacrifice genius on the altar of bourgeois philistinism, it reduces the scope of the story down to a very narrow and particular, rather than universal, application to humanity.

We can certainly sympathize with young Hans, who was robbed of his boyhood and adolescence by the insensitive ambitions of family and mentors. But there is a one-sided-ness to the portrayal. From the start, it is evident that Hans is to be a sacrificial victim, whose destruction paves the way for a condemnation of the establishment types who brought it about.

Somehow, though, Hans' portrayal strikes some incongruous notes for me. Beside being a whiz at languages, Hans seemed to be a pretty normal, although quite intelligent, kid. He loved fishing, the outdoors, keeping pets, and constructing little mechanisms such as the water wheel in his garden. But he is seduced away from all these pleasures by the mephistophelian temptation, instilled by his instructors, to become an academic star.

Somehow it doesn't ring true for me that a boy with such a love of nature would allow himself to become an inwardly pathetic, thin-armed, head-achy glory-seeker. Hesse felt he had been thwarted and impeded by the authoritarian academic system which destroyed Hans in his novel. But Hesse was not a grind who reveled in the brain-taxing philological studies of Hans, but was a nascent poet who made good his escape from the clutches of his repressive masters. Perhaps Hans had his counterpart in real life, but it seems likely that his character was a concoction designed to elicit maximum sympathy, and thus, maximum condemnation for the system and its practitioners.

It is not a poorly written or mediocre novel, but the subjectivity of its highly interior viewpoint begins to feel monotonous. More dialogue and more insight into other characters' point of view might have contributed more interest. As it stands, it reads more like an expose of a very particular situation than a universal work of art. The theme of the outstanding genius who is not properly nourished by society is one most of us can only identify with vicariously. Here, that theme is presented more or less in a vacuum, without enough inclusion of supplementary or corroboratory themes to flesh it out and make it really take on life.

The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse
$17.00
The stories are excellent, I red them in Russian before.

However, I cannot tell much about French and English translations that I ordered with Amazon a month ago. I still wait for the two books while it was indicated that I would receive them after ten working days ! Amazon did not forget to ask me for a review, it only forgot to send the books themselves !!!

I am very disappointed by Amazon's service !