May 8, 2025 9:55 PM
My second Hesse, after Siddhartha, and, in my opinion, the superior of the two. The story told is expansive. It is the rare, prismatic kind of book that seems to account for the entirety of human experience, and which, rarer still, manages to do so in a manner that is often engrossing.
I have seen others accuse this book of being borderline pornographic. This is an apt characterization, I'd say, but I disagree with the pejorative tone with which it is often conveyed. The most confounding thing about pornography is the fact that, despite its stated aims, it is often deeply unsensual. Yet, this is not true of Hesse. Hesse's depictions of sexuality here are rife with the complexity often true of real sex. Sex, here, is not depicted as an emanation of love, ultimately secondary to it, nor is it depicted as a separate force, wholly divorced from love. It occupies the unsteady middle position, a constant shifting of the needle, where emotion and physicality seem to, at once, feed into and oppose each other. Hesse here, as with Siddhartha, is aware and comfortable with the contradiction of human experience.
Incredible book.
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