A richly detailed and supremely sensitive portrayal of an artist obsessed with the “terrible and magnificent” act of...
A top-notch biography of the Nobel Prize–winning writer, who suffered spiritual crises and suicidal depression.
German biographer and film and theater critic Decker, editor of Theater der Zeit, offers a masterful, penetrating biography of Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), adroitly translated by Lewis, that deserves the accolade “definitive.” Drawing on Hesse’s voluminous correspondence (including newly available letters to Stefan Zweig and psychiatrist Josef Lang), autobiographical writings, and 20 volumes of complete works, Decker lays bare Hesse’s complex, contradictory personality, his all-consuming dedication to the creative life, his tormented relationships with women, and the cultural and political forces that found their ways into his works. The son of Pietist missionaries, Hesse rebelled violently against his parents’ fanatical religious beliefs—so violently that his parents committed him to an insane asylum when he was 15. He repeatedly sent his poems and stories to his mother, who repeatedly withheld praise or encouragement; “nothing,” Decker asserts, “could have been more important than being acknowledged by his mother as a writer.” Yearning for her love, he was torn by his need “to distance himself from this world in which art was at best a pretty ornament on the Sunday-best dress of the bourgeoisie.” Although married three times, Hesse was by nature a loner and narcissist: moody, hypochondriacal, and self-absorbed. He could never see a woman as a friend, and he demeaned and ignored his wives and lovers. Yet he was capable of friendship, with German poet Hugo Ball, for one, and Thomas Mann. Several of Hesse’s most famous novels—Demian, Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, Narcissus and Goldmund, and The Glass Bead Game—“touched the nerve of the age” by portraying a protagonist who felt alienated by society, “an outsider filled with a loathing for the world and self-disgust,” a man striving to reconcile the duality of his personality, or one compelled to wander, though longing for home. “How Ought One to Live?” Hesse asked, again and again.
A richly detailed and supremely sensitive portrayal of an artist obsessed with the “terrible and magnificent” act of creation.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-674-73788-4
Page Count: 780
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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