DEMIAN - Book review

 

Hermann Hesse’s first person narrative Demian was published in 1919 (although the Prologue was only added in 1960). Hesse died in 1962.

Emil Sinclair belongs to a respectable middle class family. He idolises his two sisters, mother and father – to begin with. But as he questions himself and his part in life, he is drawn to rebel. ‘... the frightened heart flees timidly back to the charmed valleys of childish virtues; unable to believe that this break too must be made, this bond also be severed’ (p116). He was encouraged in this break from his family by a school friend Kromer who then begins to bully and blackmail him. Emil is ultimately protected by an older boy, Max Demian, who becomes Emil’s mentor. In his quest to discover his self, Emil latches on to several individuals who help him on his journey of self-realisation and who have mentoring tendencies.

Instead of living his life, Emil is inclined to dwell unhealthily upon ‘self’ and ‘purpose’. As this is Hesse, there are inferences from Jung, Gnosticism, Leonardo da Vinci, and the psychological and moral growth of the main character. ‘There was only one true vocation for everybody – to find the way to himself’ (p120).

Demian is a mysterious young man. ‘I often try out an art which is known as thought-reading (p37): a technique that impels someone under scrutiny – the power of the stare – to do something unplanned, perhaps.  Demian questioned God as the supreme being: ‘it threatened the solid beliefs in me to which I felt I must cling’ (p58).

Eva is Demian’s very attractive mother, her visage haunting Emil. ‘If she could only be a mother to me, a lover, a goddess – if she could just be here! (p132).

Interesting insights. Too much me-me, perhaps; there’s a beautiful world out there that needs no psychoanalysis, just appreciation. Deep.

GERTRUDE - Book review

 

Hermann Hesse’s 1910 novel Gertrude is a slim work told in the first person. The narrator Kuhn comes from a reasonably wealthy family – who are not particularly keen on his chosen profession in music, as a violinist and a composer. His relationship with both parents is somewhat distant, though he grows closer to his father in time: ‘Youth ends when egotism does’ (his father tells Kuhn) ‘maturity begins when one lives for others.’ (p89)

Early in his life Kuhn suffers a serious accident and has to contend with a pronounced limp. He finds making friends problematic and repeatedly fails when seeking companionship with women. However, his musical ability is recognised by a notable opera singer, Heinrich Muoth, a flamboyant character, imbiber of alcohol and a womaniser; a friendship develops.

Kuhn makes the acquaintance of a rich merchant called Imthor, who invites him to play a Trio in E flat major that Kuhn recently composed, accompanied by another violinist and cellist. At this soiree Kuhn meets Gertrude, Imthor’s attractive daughter, and is smitten: ‘I dedicated my music and my life’s breath, my thoughts and my heart to her.’ (p65).

Gertrude is an accomplished singer and appreciates Kuhn’s musical skill. However, partly due to his awareness of his disability, Kuhn finds it hard to summon the courage to reveal to her his feelings, which remain unrequited. 

Kuhn’s life takes on complications when Muoth is introduced to Gertrude and they become an ill-matched doomed pair. This is not a romantic novel and there is no happy ending. It is however believable, annoyingly where Kuhn’s lack of self-worth is concerned, and ultimately tragic, though a kind of contentment pervades the ending.

Looking back, Kuhn states ‘… my life has not been empty and worthless. Even if my external destiny has unfolded itself as it does with everyone, inevitably and as decreed by the gods, my inner life has been my own work, with its joys and bitterness, and I, alone, hold myself responsible for it.’ (p5) [An attitude sadly lacking in many these days, it seems.] 

This was an early work for Hesse. At one point Kuhn befriends one of his teachers, Mr Lohe, who dabbles in Eastern mysticism; perhaps also signalling Hesse’s early introduction to the subject: ‘Then came the teachings about Karma. It appeared to me to be a religious interpretation of the law of causality, which was not unattractive to me.’ (p51)    

Hesse seems to get into the skin of a musician. ‘… it has been a continual consolation to me and a justification for all life that there is music in the world, that one can at times be deeply moved by rhythms and pervaded by harmonies. Oh, music! A melody occurs to you; you sing it silently, inwardly only; you steep your being in it; it takes possession of all your strength and emotions, and during the time that it lives to you, it effaces all that is fortuitous, evil, coarse and sad in you; it brings the world into harmony with you; it makes burdens light and gives wings to the benumbed!’ (p6)

Ruminating later on music, Kuhn states, prophetically: ‘… that light and dark were closely related and that sorrow and peace were rhythm, part and spirit of the same great music.’ (p26) 

‘It was simple, lyrical music, which softly pined and faded away like a summer evening, neither happy nor sad, but which hovered in the mood of an evening that is ending, like a cloud glowing at sunset.’ (p128)

Kuhn finally meets Gertrude a third of the way through the book. Yet, perplexingly, he does not describe her eyes. ‘The pretty girl made on impression on me as soon as she came in…’ (p65).  He mentions ‘her lovely bright eyes’ but not their colour (p67). He also makes friends with a musician, Teiser, and he describes his friend’s ‘blue-grey childlike eyes’ (p69). 

A harbinger is inserted by Muoth: ‘Youth is the most difficult time of life. For example, suicide rarely occurs amongst old people.’ (p71)

Anyone appreciating music will undoubtedly empathise with Kuhn in his tale of love, despair, and redemption. 

Notes:

I cannot understand why Hesse referred to a place simply as ‘R’ – particularly when other places are mentioned.

Blurb warning. Do not purchase this copy. The blurb on the back is in effect a synopsis of what is going to happen, including the tragedy at the end, destroying any shock or surprise. The blurb-writer should have been shown the door! Thankfully, other editions don't appear to have used this version of the blurb.

Book review - Rosshalde

Hermann Hesse’s short novel Rosshalde (1914) is told from an omniscient point of view. The painter Johann Veraguth bought the property and land Rosshalde and built a studio where he could avoid his wife, Adele. His older son was sent off to boarding school and his young son Pierre, aged seven, rarely crossed the studio’s threshold. Hesse was a painter and this book possesses autobiographic elements: his marriage began to disintegrate, partly due to his wife Maria’s mental issues. However, it’s quite possible his obsession with writing might have been a factor. Certainly, his character Veraguth only seemed content when painting.  ‘… he recaptured the industrious tension which tolerates no digressions and concentrates all our energies on the work in hand.’ (p11) He was incapable of perceiving his poverty of existence: he strove to perfect his works of art, yet ‘bungled his attempts at love and life’ (p73)

Gradually we learn that he made difficult demands on his wife, nothing specific, but it harmed their relationship deeply. ‘… though she had ceased to love her husband she still regarded the loss of his affection as a sadly incomprehensible and undeserved misfortune.’ (p13)  He admits, ‘I kept demanding the thing that Adele was unable to give…’ (p47)

Hesse illuminates scenes with a painter’s eye: ‘The little lake lay almost black in the total silence, the feeble light lay on the water like an infinitely thin membrane or a layer of fine dust.’ (p3) He was also a student of nature: ‘… the declining sun shone horizontally through the tree trunks and golden flames were kindled on the glassy wings of the dragonflies.’ (p27) And, in the drizzle, ‘the wet smooth trunks of the beech trees glistened black like cast iron.’ (p65)

A catalyst for change is the arrival of his friend Otto, who lives in India. He brings with him many captivating photographs of the exotic land.

[An aside: Strange coincidences abound in my selection of reading, it seems. I read March the Ninth by R.C. Hutchinson which concerned partisans in wartime Yugoslavia; next I read Alastair MacLean’s Partisans, about the same subject; yet random choice, entirely unplanned. Then I read Legacy by James Steel, where one of the protagonists is called Otto, and here in this book we have Otto!]

A friend has observed that the phrase ‘eyes narrowed’ is overused and perhaps not quite accurate. Here, Hesse avoids falling into that common trap: ‘Pierre froze. He closed his eyes except for a small slit and glared through his long lashes.’ The son’s relationship with the manservant Robert is at times amusing. Another writerly bugbear is ‘the movement of eyes, as if levitating entities in themselves – when it should be described as a gaze. Even Hesse (or his translator) succumbs: ‘(she) let her eyes roam idly over the flowers, the table, the room…’

Hesse deplored the strident nationalism leading up to the First World War; in protest against German militarism he exiled himself to Switzerland in 1919. While on a vacation at home, the eldest son Albert says he hates his father. His mother retorts: ‘Hate! Don’t use such words, they distort everything.’ As true today, as it was then.

It is quite possible that Hesse had seen or read J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904). He has Pierre say: ‘… when old people get older and older, they die in the end. I’d rather stay the way I am, and sometimes I’d like to be able to fly, and fly around the trees way up high, and in between the clouds. Then I’d laugh at everybody!’ (p39)

Illness in the home affects the family. Adele’s ‘balance had been shaken, she felt as though she were sitting on a limb that was being sawed off.’ (103)  This is a turning point for the painter. ‘It was as though his life had become once more a limpid stream or river, driving resolutely in the direction assigned to it, whereas hitherto it had stagnated in the swampy lake of indecision.’

How he makes his decision, and what it is, is annoyingly hinted at in the blurb; an unforgiveable spoiler. Indeed, it reflects Hesse’s own actions of 1911. Whatever loss Veraguth experienced, he had his art.

Hesse wrote his last book in 1943, The Glass Bead Game; he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1946; he died in 1962, aged 85.

Book review - The Prodigy

Hermann Hesse’s The Prodigy was published in 1905; its original title was Beneath the Wheel (Untem Rad); it was his second novel, following Peter Camenzind. He was twenty-nine when it was published.

 

The story concerns a gifted boy, Hans Giebenrath who passes an exam for acceptance in a seminary in Maulbronn. Prior to this and during his boarding there his education is exclusively focused on increasing his knowledge. Personal development does not figure in the syllabus. For three years his teachers, the vicar, his father and the headmaster urged him on unceasingly, allowing him not a moment’s rest. He suffered from headaches.

‘He had almost forgotten everything he knew of that sport (fishing) and during the past year he had wept bitterly when it had been forbidden on account of his examination.’ (p10)

After the exams, and before he went to the seminary, he was allowed some freedom: ‘… he was eager to catch up on the gay months he had missed with all possible haste and become once more a small, completely ordinary and irresponsible schoolboy.’ (p30)

At the seminary, Hans begins a close friendship with Hermann Heilner who provides an outlet for Hans, introducing him to poetry. ‘… but now he became aware of the treacherous power of fine-sounding words, alluring imagery and soothing rhymes, and his respect for this newly-opened world had grown, with his admiration of his friend, into a single shared feeling’ (p72).

Unfortunately, Heilner is expelled. As a result, Hans’ academic performance deteriorates with the onset of psychological problems. Once at home, Hans is adrift, with no friends from his past since he spent his childhood devoted to scholastic study. He showed much promise yet is considered a failure, and feels this acutely. When he is apprenticed as a blacksmith, it seems possible that he might at last find some fulfilment through labour. Sadly, it is not to be. The ending is not a happy one.

At the time of writing this book, which contains reminiscences of Hesse’s own past – he was expelled from that seminary – similar novels and stories in Germany addressed the issue of sensitive pupils crushed by educational tyranny in public lycées and private and military boarding schools.

Inevitably, as this is literary fiction and written so long ago, it is ‘tell’ rather than ‘show’: in effect, omniscient narrative, and indeed lyrical in this translation.

Hans probably didn’t have much of a chance, really: his father is described thus: His inner life was in every respect that of a philistine. The more sensitive side of his character had long been overlaid with the dust of neglect and now consisted of little more than the traditional rough and ready acknowledgement of the family, pride in his son and an occasional generous impulse towards the poor.’ (p5)

Hans was egged on by the local clergy, also. Interestingly, hearing about Bishops today who openly doubt is nothing new, it seems: ‘… the vicar – according to rumour – was one of the new school of thought and reputed not to believe even in the Resurrection.’ (p12) Hesse’s riposte might be: ‘For life is stronger than death and belief more powerful than doubt.’ (p37)

There are a number of bucolic passages, evoking beautiful images; in the early pages, they’re lyrical and full of hope for the future, yet towards the end of the book they become sinister: ‘The decline of the year, the silent fall of the leaves, the russet-coloured fields, the thick early morning mists, the ripe, tired dying of the vegetation drove him, as it does all sick people, into heavy hopeless moods and thoughts of deep sadness. He felt the desire to wither with it…’ (p119)

‘When a tree is pollarded, it puts out new shoots at the base, and in the same way a soul, too, which was ruined in the bud, finds its way back to the springtime of beginnings and prescient childhood… roots thrive quickly, full of sap, but it is only a semblance of life and never again will it become a healthy tree.’ (p111)

To counter these depressing images, here’s a quotation from Hesse’s book My Belief (1974): ‘Among the joys mentioned above are those granted us by our daily contact with nature. Our eyes, above all those misused, overstrained eyes of modern man, can be, if only we are willing, an inexhaustible source of pleasure… Gradually and without effort the eye trains itself to transmit many small delights, to contemplate nature … My advice to the person suffering from lack of time and from apathy is this: Seek out each day as many as possible of the small joys, and thriftily save up the larger, more demanding pleasures for holidays and appropriate hours. It is the small joys first of all that are granted us for recreation for daily relief and disburdenment, not the greater ones.’ Essay, ‘On Little Joys’, 1905.

Not lost in translation – 1 - German and French

An earlier FaceBook discussion about the paucity of foreign language books translated into English prompted me to check out my own library.  Below are two images of a quarter of the library.

The other shelves are elsewhere… These books here are in the main fiction, with some reference and art books and Jen’s Spanish tomes. I must admit that the majority of translated works on the shelves are not modern authors, after all, and some I have yet to read (among several hundred others!)

Here you’ll find Dumas, Simenon and Verne – the most popular novelists translated.

Others are, in no particular order:

Allain & Souvestre’s Fantomas, the first of a series, originally in French, published in 1911. There were 31 sequels. Souvestre died of the Spanish ‘flu in 1914, while Allain fought in the trenches, survived, produced eleven more Fantomas novels plus six hundred novels, and married Souvestre’s widow. Fantomas was an antihero, malevolent, a genius of crime, waging war on bourgeois society, masked and wearing evening clothes, a dagger in hand. He ‘violated society women and left their delicately slashed bodies for the servants to find…’

 

And of course the collected works of Guy de Maupassant, which I actually picked up during a visit to Canada! Also, Count Jan Potocki’s The Sargasso Manuscript. This last is a selection of stories written in the tale within a tale style, describing the adventures of a young Spanish captain reared in France who, on a visit to his country, sleeps in a haunted inn and finds his life turned into a gothic nightmare. Originally written in French and first published in St Petersberg in 1804. The original only in Polish contains stories for 66 ‘Days’; this English translation covers only the first fourteen days. Potocki was a Polish nobleman, traveller, diplomat, soldier, ethnologist, archaeologist and balloonist.

Another ‘Frenchman’ is Claude Izner. This is actually the penname of two sisters, Liliane Korb and Laurence Lefevre. They’re booksellers on the banks of the Seine and experts on nineteenth century Paris. Izner’s hero in The Murder on the Eiffel Tower is a young bookseller, Victor Legris, who witnesses the death. As he investigates further, more deaths occur… Legris’s follow-up adventure is The Pere-Lachaise Mystery (2003,2007).

 

Thomas Mann is considered the most important figure in German literature in the first half of the twentieth century. His prose is of his time, omniscient with author intrusion, but soon you get lost in his often monumental tales. The Magic Mountain (1924), Death in Venice (1911), Confessions of Felix Krull (1955) and Buddenbrooks (1901) which drew on autobiographical material. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929.

Some years ago I went through a Hermann Hesse phase and found his collection Stories of Five Decades as a good introduction to his work, ranging from 1899 (he was born in Germany in 1877) up to 1948. He is known for, among others, The Prodigy, Rosshalde, Demian, Siddhartha, Steppenwolf and The Glass Bead Game. He got his Nobel in 1946.

Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is a marathon 7 volumes and I haven’t finished it yet. Its new title is In Search of Lost Time (revised translation in 1992). My copy is a translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (1981), and it flows beautifully.

‘… so strong an element of hypocrisy is there in even the most sincere people, who lay aside the opinion they actually hold of a person while they are talking to him and express it as soon as he is no longer there…’ – Swann’s Way, p163.

‘There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full tilt, singing as one goes.’ – Swann’s Way, p424

 

Zola was remarkably prolific. He gained immediate notoriety with Therese Raquin (1867), the book being labelled ‘pornography’ by critics, whose comments Zola referred to as ‘a churlish and horrified outcry’, thus ensuring its sure-fire success. The novel is a grim tale of adultery, murder and revenge and is still powerful today.

Next, I’ll look at the Spanish and other language translations in my library…