This is an anomaly in Hesse's ouvre – a personal piece in which he risks alienating his wider audience, and yet in another sense his most universal work. It's true, I say this having had few successes in recommending it, yet so far no-one I've given it to has disliked it, even if it has left them...
"Noi pensatori cerchiamo di avvicinarci a Dio staccando il mondo da lui. Tu ti avvicini a lui amando e ricreando la sua creazione. Sono entrambe opere umane e inadeguate, ma l'arte è più innocente."Questo non è un libro che andrebbe letto a diciannove anni. Diciannove sono già troppi. Andrebbe le...
This one is on harmony. On concordance and discordance. This one passage, very early into the book, summarizes the theme best:"Of all the conceptions of pure bliss that people and poets have dreamed of, listening to the harmony of the spheres always seemed to me the highest and most intense. That...
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Hermann Hesse can not fail me! This was the case with his novels, and this also applies to the collection of fairy-tales.In the original German edition, which I have read, there are a total of only 20 stories. I say "only" because the English edition apparently contains 22 stories. I'm inclined t...
A breezy collection of light fantasy stories from a typically heavy-handed spiritual explorer, most of these tales feel undercooked (most likely intentionally) compared to Hesse's other works. I agree with Hesse (and many others) on the cultural significance of fairy/folk tales, but it's hard to...
Half Bourgeois/Half Wolf"Steppenwolf" starts with a fascinating 20 page preface that places a more conventional perspective on the rest of the novel (which is quite radical, if not exactly nihilist).The unnamed first person narrator could be one of us. He purports to be "a middle class man, livin...
Próximo al compendio de sus concepciones sobre la condición humana y la creación literaria, a la vez que puente tendido entre el esteticismo de su época y el compromiso existencial de la siguiente, EL JUEGO DE LOS ABALORIOS -última novela publicada por Hermann Hesse (1877-1962)- es la representac...
This story showcases Hesse’s brilliant prose mixed with his thoughts on life, aging, and love. In a story centered around a bright, gifted, yet timid boy Hesse shows both sides of the spectrum, celebrating the pain and sorrow along with the joys and surprises of life. The boy’s tale is equally ...
I love Hesse, one of my favorite authors ever. Not only is the spirtualism/sensualism dichotomy (which forms the major theme of all of his works) one of the more interesting philosophical questions of mankind, but I can't think of any author who has continually revealed his own personal neuroses...
Chi è Siddharta? È uno che cerca, e cerca soprattutto di vivere intera la propria vita. Passa di esperienza in esperienza, dal misticismo alla sensualità, dalla meditazione filosofica alla vita degli affari, e non si ferma presso nessun maestro, non considera definitiva nessuna acquisizione, perc...
Publicada en 1905, Bajo las ruedas, primera novela de Hermann Hesse (1887-1962), es una prodigiosa recreación del mundo de la adolescencia, pero también una severa acusación contra los sistemas educativos que se imponen a costa de la imaginación y del cultivo armónico de las facultades espiritual...
First published in 1930, Narcissus and Goldmund is the story of two diametrically opposite men: one, an ascetic monk firm in his religious commitment, and the other, a romantic youth hungry for worldly experience.Hesse was a great writer in precisely the modern sense: complex, subtle, allusive: a...
They were so big that the branches and boughs of their gigantic crowns had grown tangled into one another, and they arched over the entire cemetery like one enormous roof. The origin of these beautiful lindens, however, lies several centuries further back and is the subject of this story. In Berl...
For you are on a good course when you confess to me, when you confess to yourself, every stirring of the heart. But do not call any emotion petty, any emotion unworthy. Every one is good, very good, even hatred, even envy, even jealousy, even cruelty. All we live on are our poor, lovely, glorious...
As we have already indicated, our knowledge of this end is fragmentary, rather more in the nature of a legend than of a historical narrative. We shall have to be content with that. We therefore take all the more pleasure in being able to fill out this next-to-last chapter of Knecht’s life with an...
He watched the sun rise above wooded mountains and set above the distant palm-lined shore. At night he saw the stars arranged in formation on the sky and the crescent moon drifting like a boat on a sea of blue. He saw trees, stars, animals, clouds, rainbows, cliffs, herbs and flowers, stream and ...
It had been that way with Richard, Elizabeth, Signora Nardini, and it had been so with the carpenter. Now, a full-grown man who did not think all that badly of himself, I found myself the astonished and grateful pupil of a wretched cripple. If ever the time comes when I complete and publish the w...
He expected to find his friend changed and feared that his agitation of the night before would have given way to cool irony and embarrassment. Instead, Johann came to meet him with quiet gravity. “So you’re leaving tomorrow,” he said. “I understand. And thank you for everything. You know, I haven...
In the eighty years between a note that the four-year-old dictated to his mother in 1881 and the thank-you note that he mailed to a colleague shortly following his eighty-fifth birthday in 1962, he wrote over thirty thousand letters and cards to hundreds of correspondents. Hesse was seemingly inc...