AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITINGS

by Hermann Hesse ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 15, 1972

Twelve autobiographical pieces, translated into English for the first time, by the author of Steppenwolf, Siddartha, and other well-known novels, and poetry. Because relatively little is known about Hesse's life, the book is a valuable one, and in its own right absorbing. Hesse was born in 1877 in the southern German region of Swabia; he describes the chief influences in his life as his grandfather, a benign sorcerer figure with his Oriental scholarship and encompassing religious spirit, and two severe teachers; the roots of his imagination are found in the Black Forest climate of ""rye bread and fairy tales,"" in his ""background of tenderly nurtured sensualism,"" and, though this does not figure prominently in the book, in a devotion to Eastern thought. The pieces range from small fragments on India (1911, 1916) to a 1925 ""conjectural"" autobiographical sketch to the lengthy ""A Guest at the Spa"" (1924) and ""On Moving to a New House"" (1931). Theodore Ziolkowski's introduction notes that Jungian therapy inspired Hesse's direct self-explorations and his work, too, has a pronounced autobiographical element -- but there are no thumping archetypes here, no expressions of ""higher consciousness."" Indeed, those who associate Hesse with head-shop mysticism will be surprised at the thoroughly bourgeois tone and content of the book, and the agreeable Central European irony, also bourgeois, which shapes Hesse's self-distancing, as in his accounts of Baden and house-choosing. There are existentialist mottoes of a rather banal character -- salvation through living life, focus on own self rather than the ""business of the world"" -- but in his cultivated devotion to authorship and mild toyings with Nietzsche he is a far cry from latterday dropout ideology. His wife, children, brothers and sisters, as well as history itself, rarely come through at all; nor are there revelations about his work processes. Rather this is a measured exploration of the externals of a rich life as well as the middle levels of the self.

Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1972

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1972

Categories: NONFICTION