I’ve read three books by Hermann Hesse before – Narcissus and Goldmund, Siddhartha, and a collection of poetry. Hesse was one of my favourite writers at one point. But I haven’t read a Hesse book in a while, and I thought I had grown out of Hesse. But then I read the first page of ‘Demian‘ and it was wonderful and so I decided to read it. I read this for German Literature Month hosted by Caroline from Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and Lizzy from Lizzy’s Literary Life.
The narrator of the story is Emil Sinclair. As the story begins, he looks back on his past, and tells us his lifestory. He describes how when he was a kid, he discovered that the world was light and dark, how the safety and coziness of his home and family was light, while outside his house lurked many dark things. And what happened when one day, the darkness crept into the light. He goes on to describe, how this interplay between light and dark continued through his life, how different people took him under their wing and mentored and supported him and how he got caught in the middle of historical events.
The start of the story is brilliant and four-fifths of the story is wonderful, vintage Hesse. But things turn somewhere in the last part, and the story becomes a melange of spirituality and history and some prescriptive philosophy, and though one of my favourite characters makes an appearance in the last part of the story, the story sinks here and it hasn’t aged well. Maybe, the readers of that time loved it more.
The mentors of the narrator are all very fascinating, including the title character Demian, but my favourite out of them was a person called Pistorius, who plays the organ in a small church. He looks simple, doesn’t dress well, doesn’t look good, doesn’t talk much, but inside his mind lives an amazing person. The conversations between the narrator and Pistorius were some of my favourite parts of the book.
I also discovered this sentence in the book – “For it had gained the whole world, while losing its soul in the process.” It made me smile Because another version of this sentence is one of my favourite sentences ever, and it is from W. Somerset Maugham’s short story, ‘The Fall of Edward Barnard‘. Maugham was a voracious reader who read in German and French too, and he was famous for borrowing plots and characters from the German and French novels that he read. Now, I am wondering whether Maugham just borrowed this sentence from Hesse and modified it to his story’s requirement 😊 Can’t put this copycatting past old, wily Will 😊
I enjoyed reading ‘Demian‘. Not as much as ‘Narcissus and Goldmund’ or ‘Siddhartha’, but I still liked it. I wish I had read it when I was younger, at a more impressionable age. I think I would have liked it more then. Hesse’s thoughts on the greatness of eastern mysticism and how after the First World War a new world was going to come out which was going to be beautiful – these haven’t aged well. The world seems to be hurtling from one crisis to another with no end in sight. Francis Fukuyama wrote a book after the end of the Cold War era called ‘The End of History and the Last Man’, the main contention of the book being that communism is dead, the West has won, and now life is heaven. Now, after nearly thirty years, we can’t resist laughing at this contention with contempt 😊 We’ll be more kind to Hesse though – he had no way of knowing that human beings were more crazier than he thought.
I’ll leave you with two of my favourite passages from the book.
“I could do everything the others were capable of; with a little diligence and effort I could read Plato, solve problems in trigonometry, or follow a chemical analysis. There was only one thing I couldn’t do: tear out the obscurely hidden aim within me and visualize it somewhere before my eyes, as others did, those who knew precisely that they wanted to become a professor, judge, doctor, or artist, who knew how long that would take them and what benefits it would bring them. I couldn’t do that. Maybe I would become something of the sort in the future, but how was I to know? Perhaps I might even have to seek and seek for years and never become anything or reach any goal. Perhaps I might reach some goal, but it would be evil, perilous, frightening. All I really wanted was to try and live the life that was spontaneously welling up within me. Why was that so very difficult?”
“Two or three times on my walks through town, I had heard organ music coming from a smallish suburban church…I felt that the man playing there knew that a treasure was locked away in that music, and was suing, insisting, and striving for that treasure as if for his life…Everything he played was religious, devout, and pious, but not with the piety of churchgoers and pastors—rather, with the piety of medieval pilgrims and beggars; it was pious with an unconditional surrender to a universal emotion that rose above any particular faith. He diligently played composers earlier than Bach, and old Italian masters. And they all stated the same thing, they all stated what the musician had in his soul as well: longing, the most intimate grasping of the world and the most reckless separation from it again, an ardent listening to one’s own obscure soul, a frenzy of devotion and a profound curiosity for the miraculous.”
Have you read ‘Demian‘? What do you think about it? Which is your favourite Hesse book?
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