by Hermann Hesse
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Product Description
Hesse's novel of two medieval men, one quietly content with his religion and monastic life, the other in fervent search of more worldly salvation. This conflict between flesh and spirit, between emotional and contemplative man, was a life study for Hesse. It is a theme that transcends all time. The Hesse Phenomenon "has turned into a vogue, the vogue into a torrent. . .He has appealed both to. . . an underground and to an establishment. . .and to the disenchanted young sharing his contempt for our industrial civilization."--The New York Times Book Review
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 a true work of literature., 2007-10-11
This book is a wonderful philosophical book that shows the contrast between feelings and thoughts.While reading I was was confronted by quite a number of necessary metaphysical questions.Questions regarding our belief, emotion, thought, perception, logic, divinity and existence. The book shows the struggle of inner human heart which managed to reach the true self consciousness.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
A transient's mentality, dilemmas and possible arrivals, 2007-07-05
Hesse's account of how many of your inclinations get enamored by each other's possible arrival. A dilemma in each young thinker's mind taken as far as it went and presented as a story of a vagabond and an abbot is gripping and one which all us can identify with in one way or the other. A masterpiece !
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
 Great adolescent book, weak adult book, 2007-03-05
I put this book in the same category as Kerouac's "On The Road" - a great, adolescent adventure story (and one that inspired me when I was an adolescent).
Although this book will always hold a place in my heart - unforgettable characters, some powerful scenes, some beautiful descriptions - upon rereading it I now see its limits more clearly.
A quick laundry list:
1) I found much of the philosophizing (and waxing eloquent about psychology) gratuitous - two-thirds could have been cut with little loss to the book.
2) The countless sex scenes read as juvenile, one-night stands - and yet were presented as a testament to masculinity and adventure and internal questing and life itself. I was disappointed that Goldmund essentially wasted his entire life having affairs (some with young teenage girls) and never really grew past them. I can't help but wonder what this says about Hermann Hesse (who wrote the book in his 50s).
3) Hesse presented the characters (and philosophies) of Narcissus and Goldmund as opposites or complements who together created a whole, but over and over I felt that he was missing the bigger picture, hampered by his own lack of perspective.
4) I wanted to know more about Narcissus's character - his childhood, his feelings, his dimensions. Hesse gave us almost nothing, and if you take Narcissus's character as written you basically have a very schizoid and repressed - but gentle - gay guy who's spent his life hiding in a cloister.
I wonder how I would have reacted to this book had I not read it first as an adolescent. I suspect I wouldn't have finished it.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
 Art, sex, death, 2007-02-09
This was one of my favorite novels in my late teens and early twenties. Ostensibly it is about two medieval seminary friends personifying opposite poles of being: Narcissus, the introspective priest, represents the orderly spiritual and intellectual realm of the father, of the church, and of philosophy and science, while his counterpart Goldmund arrives as an unconfident, confused and dissatisfied student compelled to rebel against the stifling monastery life into which he's been thrust so as to find himself alone in the secular world of art, imagination, and sensuality encompassed by Mother Nature. Like Hesse rereading this same novel after many years ("Events in the Engadine" (1953)) I dusted off and taped together my tattered paperback, underlined and asterisked in revealing passages, and slowly savored it over a recent fall month. Some of the writing seemed a bit overdone and even, "embarrassing", as T. Ziolkowski "The Novels of Hermann Hesse: A Study in Theme and Structure," Princeton U. Press (1965) comments, but I still enjoyed re-experiencing Goldmund's picaresque wanderings throughout the Black Death. He camps in the woods and stops in villages, meets fellow wanderers, drinks and socializes in taverns, finds work where he can, and discovers pleasure and temporary respite in his many encounters with women. Throughout his worldly adventures there is always danger and ignorance to be avoided.
Hesse's novels depict individuals at different stages of personal development and N&G picks up where Demian leaves off. A liberated Sinclair is transposed into Goldmund as he seeks out his "Mother Eva" once he's broken from the insular confines of the monastery. What I like most about this novel is the picaresque theme of seeking and personal redemption during times of chaos. To Hesse these redemptive forces are always art. Goldmund meets a master wood carver in a village and becomes his apprentice, eventually becoming a master sculptor himself. The passages where Goldmund is an artist and city-dweller are the most interesting to me, evoking similar scenes from "Steppenwolf" and "Siddhartha", as well as the short stories "Klingsor's Last Summer" and "Knulp". And even though the idyllic medieval setting is simply sketched as a conceptual backdrop, selected by Hesse due to its being a time in which the average European life was ordered around the church, and the ever-present threat of death, it creates space for the reader's imagination and curiosity to wander along with Goldmund.
Yet this time around I felt compelled to focus on Narcissus, hoping against my previous experiences with this novel for a fuller conception of his elusive, rather flatly drawn character, to discover something more profound. While I did re-encounter some descriptive snippets I'd not taken notice of before, especially an insightful dialogue towards the end on "thinking vs. imagining" (p. 277), ultimately, I came to the conclusion that Narcissus should remain the elusive spirit, seemingly devoid of the artistic attention Goldmund receives. Though I would have liked it if Hesse had written more about Narcissus's inner struggles with God and life within Mariabronn, perhaps going off on extended tangents about philosophy and Christianity or celibacy and homosexuality within the church (thus in all likelihood making Hesse enemy #1 to his book-burning countrymen in Nazi Germany, who burned this book anyway; not to mention the probable ire of his editors) but the fact is that Hesse originally conceived the idea of the novel around Goldmund, only later intending for Narcissus to have equal weight. The prototype for N&G can be found in an early, unfinished story called "Berthold" ("Tales of Student Life," Farrar, Straus & Giroux (1976)) in which the focal character of Berthold is essentially an earlier version of Goldmund. Nevertheless, Narcissus's importance is clear in that in the end it is his spiritual life that is the pole from which Goldmund departs and, eventually returns. In any event, a reader wanting more of Narcissus (and many of the philosophical "tangents" & wanderings I mentioned above) will find his reincarnation in Joseph Knecht in the transcendental "The Glass Bead Game". Ultimately, even though Hesse's attempt at a "Doppelroman", or "double-novel" representing two separate lives and realms equally, comes up short in a structural sense, the attempt is perhaps more interesting because of these flaws.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Quintessential Hesse, 2006-03-19
Hesse is widely loved for a number of things: the themes he addresses, the often unexpected light he casts on them, and the detail with which he develops his characters and their setting. His style, even when addressing weighty matters of substance, is simple and never resorts to O'Henry-style tricks. His stories are accessible to most literate people, never relying on technical or obscure language.
Narcissus and Goldmund is probably as good an example of mainstream Hesse as any of his books (at least, of the six or seven I have read over a period of decades). It lacks the exoticism of Steppenwolf and is more complex than several of his shorter works. Perhaps the book it most closely resembles is Siddhartha, since its questions and theme are developed through considering the interplay of spiritual and worldly calling.
In this volume, great principles and different modes of knowing are embodied in the two protagonists. I wept upon reading Goldmund's dying words to Narcissus, as he frames the ultimate question for his cherished friend. Hesse's work is about each one of us, pilgrims on our way to death's shrine.
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