Hello all.
I’m currently reading Hermann Hesse’s books, and I’d like to express how I feel about them. I suspect that this is going to be a lengthy post, or at least a convoluted, maybe a little confused one, and I realise that you are unlikely to stick all the way through… so I’ll state the bottom line upfront, maybe a little bluntly. This way you’d know what I’m about to say without having to wade through it all:
After reading 4 of his books (Siddhartha; Steppenwolf; Narcisus & Goldmund; and Demian – in this order), my feeling is one of unease, bordering confusion. Hesse is – no doubt – a great writer. I’m sure he had a lot to say, and a lot of it was very original. Obviously, he also didn’t lack in talent. But he still left me with a deep feeling of… how should I put it? Almost getting there; but not quite.
A bit of context: Hesse was born in Germany in 1877 and published his first novel at age 27 (in 1904). He was quite productive over the 1st half of the 20th century, and published 10 full-length novels (as well as a lot of other shorter-form work). His last “big” work (The Glass Bead Game, which I’m about to start reading; maybe it will change my mind…?) was published in 1943, and 3 years later (1946) he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature. He died in 1962. He lived most of his life in Switzerland.
I did not plan to read Hesse at all… though I had a vague recollection from my teens that he was considered a great writer, “a modern classic”. I remember hearing about Siddhartha, but somehow it never attracted my attention enough for actually reading it (which is a real shame, because it’s a short book that one can read in 2-3 days, as I did, even though I’m a slow reader). So, how did it happen?… I read someone’s post about Murakami’s Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (which I read a few years ago – great book, by the way), and in the responses someone mentioned that Hesse’s Steppenwolf is “somewhat similar” (if I recall correctly). Now, after reading it, I quite disagree; but it’s immaterial. The important point is that it encouraged me to give it a go. No, this is not a mistake – I did finish Siddhartha before Steppenwolf; I’ll get to that shortly.
Well… I quickly found out that Steppenwolf is no ordinary book (but not in the Murakami way!), and in a sense it was quite hard for me to “get into it”. Looking back, I got that feeling even before the story line got super-unusual. Anyway, I was plodding along at a slow pace, and at some point I decided to try Siddhartha, and see if it was quite different. It was! More readable, less “weird”, but just the same, full of depth and of ideas I resonated with. I could easily see how that book became so influential in the USA in the 60s, and helped popularise ancient India’s thinking (and, to a degree, Buddhism) in the West, in timing with the hippie era (though Hesse wrote it much earlier, around 1920).
So, where’s my confusion? It started about halfway (or two-thirds) through Siddhartha. Every time I felt “I finally got it”, every time Siddhartha seemed to have found his real path, every time he understood his previous “erroneous” thinking (or goals) – it suddenly changed direction again, added layers, aggregated, branched out, and sometimes just wiped the board clean and started over… What’s wrong with that, you might ask?… Isn’t it great, original writing?… Isn’t that literary richness? Yes, I agree. I have no qualms with the richness and non-linearity. My difficulty is with the uneasy feeling that it never quite gels. It goes on like that all the way through, and at least for me, the end result, at the last page, was still confusion – a kind of anticipation for things to come together. It felt – all the way through – like an endless change of thought lines; almost like “Hm… he changed his thinking so many times before – why wouldn’t he change it again?… What is this book actually telling me?”
I know, I know, all you smart asses…”There is no one absolute truth”, “It’s good to have diversity of thinking”, “It’s your job to decide”, “it’s more about encouraging you to think”, bla bla bla… I know that genre. Yet Siddhartha felt to me more like an undecided work, even an unfinalised draft in a sense. Almost like it was a collection of raw materials, yet to be arranged more coherently.
Caveat: I am no literary scholar. I never studied literature “the proper way” (except for forced-upon, ineffective classes in high school), never learned to dissect and analyze literary work methodically, and honestly – never really felt the desire to do that. I also can’t claim I am truly “well read” (in terms of quantity or breadth). If you read my other posts, you might have already realised that. Here, I express my raw (lay? silly?) opinions, that are backed by nothing but my passion for reading and my thinking brain. I’m well aware that my opinions, expressed here, could be completely invalid in the scholarly sense, haha.
So I thought, maybe I just missed something in the way I took Siddhartha in?
And so, I went back to Steppenwolf. I finished it. In a way, it was even worse… Even more numerous different ideas, bigger fissures in the plot / style, bigger swerving in the narrative around “the actual secret, underlying truth”. Additionally, unlike Siddhartha, Steppenwolf also has some Murakami-esque fantastic arcs (which can explain why that post mentioned it in the context of Tsukuru, though Hesses’s fantasy did not feel to me as fully-owned as Murakami’s – again, that feeling of a “draft version”). And so, again – the same sense of confusion, unease, and wondering: “What was he actually trying to convey? What did he want me to take away from it?” (Except for a sense of uncertainty, haha)
Next, I read Narcissus and Goldmund. Whilst this book seems to have a more straightforward, traditional-style story line, it also exhibits (or at least that was the impression it created in me) the same, “No, scrap that, I thought I had it right, but actually life and existence are about…” – multiple times. And then, again, at the end of the book, the same feeling of “Well, what was it all about?…” Some of the insights are quite profound, granted. But the whole felt a little… arbitrary.
Another aspect that bothered me in Narcissus and Goldmund, which also exists (perhaps to a lesser degree) in Steppenwolf and Demian (which I’ll touch on briefly below) is the attitude to sex. Narcissus and Goldmund is the clearest example among them because Goldmund’s life and most of the story line seem to revolve around sexual desire (sometimes to a destructive obsession level), though Hesse related to it as “Love” (in the context of women, in contrast with Goldmund’s love to Narcissus). Perhaps Hesse was a victim of his era’s concepts (don’t forget – all these books were written before the 1940s); regardless, he consistently mixes up heterosexual “love” with sex and lust, and perpetuates the era’s convention of masking sexual desire with that thin veil of “love”. This is actually a little odd, because he does present another kind of (lofty) love – between Narcissus and Goldmund – but he never quite clarifies how these two types differ, while it’s clear that they do… In that context I couldn’t help thinking whether Narcissus and Goldmund experienced some kind of homosexual attraction, and when Narcissus eventually kisses the dying Goldmund on his forehead (I didn’t see that coming!…) I was for a millisecond hopeful for a twist in the plot… which never came.
The last Hesse book I’ve read so far is Demian (which is actually the earliest written among the four I’ve read). Whilst the style is somewhat different from, say, Steppenwolf, my feeling of unease is quite similar, and for reasons similar to the ones I described above. Hence, I will not repeat. The only thing I feel worth adding at this point is that in Demian I, once again, saw glimpses of Murakami-style fantasy, connections or jumps which couldn’t be reasoned, and therefore required a leap of faith. That was quite enjoyable. Unlike in Steppenwolf, it didn’t feel awkward, and was better integrated in the “realistic” plot.
I hope you found this review entertaining at least, if not especially interesting… I wrote it perhaps more as an account to myself. I can’t wholeheartedly recommend reading Hesse, except maybe Siddhartha, which is a classic by now, and a fairly short book. That is, unless you are a literary scholar and interested in particular in the works of Nobel prize laureates…
Peace to all, and see you next time!
_________________________________
Did you know…? There are more posts in this blog than are presented to you right now. It’s an attribute of the template which I can’t change.
How to see all of them?
Click on the header – the bold “The Meaning of Life and Other Vegetables” at the top. You’ll get a list (which is not complete either), with a button at the bottom to access the next list, and so on. Those go all the way back to my first post in this blog.
Enjoy Reading!
Leave a Reply