النتائج (
العربية) 1:
[نسخ]نسخ!
There's a scene in Antonio Tabucchi's Indian Nocturne in which the narrator meets an Indian intellectual who asks him, among other things, what he thinks of Hermann Hesse. The narrator, resenting the interruption and perhaps with a sense he is being mocked, heaps scorn on the German 'spiritualist', calling him sentimental and likening him to some kind of sweet liqueur, and only after the conversation is over does he realise he has not said what he really thought of Hesse at all. In some way, these days, I suspect there's a little of this narrator in many of us. Hesse - unlike Kafka or Beckett or Mann - is not an intellectual's badge of honour. Frequently, I've approached one or another of his books again after a hiatus half-expecting that this time I will have grown out of him - like those old Cure records that once seemed so important - but I never do. The Journey to the East has enthralled me since I first read it in my teens - and I probably understand only marginally more of it now than I did then. The 'Treatise on the Steppenwolf' (unlike much of the rest of that most famous of his novels) I likewise revere. The early novella Knulp is as good. Demian has its moments, Siddhartha too (though again its fame is out of proportion to its content), and Klingsor's Last Summer and many of the short stories and even Narziss and Goldmund if you're on a roll and don't want to stop. But looming over all of them, dwarfing them and pulling together most of what is best in each of them is The Glass Bead Game, a book which, despite myself, and though I doubt I'll be able to convey why without reading it again (a fourth time), I count among the five or so most transformative reading experiences in my lifetime.
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