Customer Reviews (1)

CHARMING!
The book consists of six narrative poems describing beautiful scenes of nature.
Hesse takes you with him for his morning walk through his garden drawing a lively picture of his flowers, vegetables and trees. He describes the hard work and the time he, his wife, Natalina and Lorenzo put to make this garden one entity of beauty and care. You take every step with him up the hill... see every tree and feel the warm sun ...and even smell the burning leaves. Of course Hesse never forgets to comment on human nature and life!
Whether he was planting his tree, describing the broken bough, the pavilion or the fall wind blowing at the old man's face... each poem has its message of contentment, serenity and natural beauty.

"The Lame Boy" is a recollection of his childhood and his relationship with a crippled boy, a "comrade" who taught him patience and understanding nature but could never call a friend!! He remembers his summers with this boy, going fishing together, showing his weak body but revealing his true qualities as a person. He talks about how we judge people and comments on the way he looked at his friend and what he thinks of him now after all those years.

I enjoyed reading the poems and I read the book more than once. The description is sublime... and I couldn't believe the sense of calmness it had on me!! ... Read more

Book Description
Moral conviction, not political inclination, determined Hermann Hesse's participation in German sociopolitical matters. The belief that artists, the ever-alert guardians of human values and cultural heritage, were society's admonishing conscience, determined Hesse's sociopolitical engagement, fashioned his considerable body of political articles, and made him a chronic persona non grata in Germany. It was likewise not the spiritual lure of the Orient that drew Hesse eastward—for him, the East was less a spiritual journey than an aesthetic adventure. Although Hesse remained a Westerner in thought and belief, his art acquired an enriching exotic cast and his essays and reviews an added Eastern dimension.This bipartite study focuses upon these two evolving major engagements—Hesse's continuous adult sociopolitical involvements and his lifelong preoccupation with Eastern thought and belief, both firmly rooted in his family's passionate Pietist dedication to the service of God and humankind—and their impact upon both Hesse and his writings. ... Read more

Book Description
Miguel Serrano, a Chilean diplomat and writer who has travelled widely in India studying Yoga, had a close friendship with Jung and Hesse at the end of their lives. This book is the outcome of his meetings and correspondence with them. Many letters are reproduced including documents of great importance written to the author by Jung shortly before his death, explaining his ideas about the nature of the world and of his work. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Read this review before you buy
While I enjoyed this book, it fell short of the other reviews posted here. I'll preface my review - my readings of Jung are more limited than Hesse. I would rate the Hesse portion 2 stars, and the Jung Section 4 stars.

Serrano romanticizes both Hesse and Jung to the point that they are portrayed as spiritual leaders. Serrano reminded me of a wide-eyed traveler who enjoyed idealizing the East, never really becoming entrenched in the culture. Spirituality isn't found by moving to India as much as Serrano alludes. It is possible my cynicism is a result of a recent trip to Asia where I encountered many travelers that reminded me of Serrano's worldly immaturity, although his later fascination with Nazism lends itself to my analysis.

I was looking forward to the linkage between these authors and East theology/philosophy, but I think Serrano came up short. Some ideas he purports came from Jung or Hesse were around long before either author was born, and I do not think either author would say otherwise.

Serrano fixates, at times, on himself a bit too much. Maybe some readers find Serrano interesting, but I was reading the book for insight into Hesse and Jung.

Serrano wrote about Hesse as if Hesse were the Buddha. If you are interested in spiritual guidance I'd search elsewhere. Personally I think Hesse led a life of greater inner turmoil than Serrano lets on in this piece. I can appreciate the other reviewer's comment about people misunderstanding Hesse, however I found reading Hesse's "Wandering" more fruitful than this work.

I did enjoy the Jung section. Serrano focuses less on himself in the Jung section and has more detailed accounts of interactions which I found fascinating. However, my readings of Jung are somewhat limited so the section may not actually offer much insight compared to other works.

I'd recommend reading the book for the Jung section, but maybe get this book from the library rather than buying it.

enchantingtale of two friendships.
An enchanting book by the controversial author Miguel Serrano.Serrano's booksare often hard to interpret (requiring a knowledge of Alchemy, Gnosticism, Norse Paganism, Arthurian myth, Nietzschean Philosophy, Jungian Psychology, as well as Tantra both Buddhist and Hindu in order to decipher) but this is one of his more straightforward works.Serrano does an excellent job of drawing one into the story its almost as if you are on a spiritual pilgrimage with him.Despite the fact that I loved his two other books that have been translated into English ( NOS book of the Resurrection and The Secret Flower) I put off buying this book for some reason.After having read a few of Hesse's works and finding them tobe truly amazing I knew I had to stop putting it off and buy it.I wasn't disappointed.

The Hermetic Circle
_This is the second time that I have read this remarkable book. Both times I found myself envying the author for having established friendships with two of my greatest heroes, two of the greatest sages of modern times, Hermann Hesse and C.G. Jung.

_This is not some collection of trivial exchanges- from the first meeting with both men the tone of the conversations were deep and significant. As the author says, it was like he had known both men before and they were resuming an old discussion. Hess himself commented on it and said that, "Here, only the right guests meet. This is the Hermetic Circle...." Sounds rather like Jung's concept of synchronicity, though Jung also speaks of Hermetic links with past and future in these discussions.

_While both sections cover a remarkable amount of the core meaning of the life work of both men, there is also a personal sense here. You feel like you are meeting them yourself, are also guests in their houses. Not that the ideas are all rehash either- here and there something new pops up. An example would be how in one of the interviews with Jung the discussion turned to how both the ancient Greeks and the Native Americans both thought from their hearts and not their heads. Thinking exclusively from one's head is the result of dissociation between ego and Self- and sets up a tension that may tear a person or culture to pieces. In any case, you feel that you know both men. Of course, Hesse's novels were autobiographical in the deepest sense (and it is reaffirming to know that he actually was an accurate reflection of his characters- it wasn't just a show.) As for Jung, he states outright that he wrote primarily for his own process of individuation and that the fact that so many others read him made him frankly uncomfortable.

_I was glad to see that my own perceptions of these often misunderstood and misinterpreted men seem to have been accurate from the start. For me too it was like a conversation with old friends- relinking with the Hermetic Circle.

crossroads of history
Serrano was a writer and diplomat who sought out 2 masters as a spiritual/philosophic seeker. Fascinating biography, mixed with Serrano's own fixations.

Serrano later fixated on Adolph Hitler, so there certainly seems to be a germanic bent that he followed. Read "Black Sun" to see the strange path MS took after his encounters with Hesse and Jung.

Very Enlightening!
I picked this up because I had read several books by Hesse and was interested in Mr. Serrano's personal experiences with the Master. I foundhis writing to be quite engaging, and felt as if I had met Hesse myself.The section on Jung piqued my interest enough for me to search for his, TheUndiscovered Self, which I loved as well. I also went on to read Mr.Serrano's, The Ultimate Flower. Unfortunately most of Serrano's other worksare out of print. Get this before it goes o.o.p. too. You won't regret it. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

One of the best biographies I have read, ever
This book is not only a very thorough biography of Hermann Hesse.

It is also one of the best biographies I have ever read. Among other things, it does a very impressive job of blending Hesse's life and work, explaining how precise parts of a given book were influenced with events in his life, and so on.

I do wish all biographies were as well researched, and as well written, as this one.

Necessary for any serious student of Hermann Hesse
Ralph Freedman ranks with Joseph Mileck, Theodore Ziokowski, and Mark Boulby in his importance to Hesse scholarship.Freedman previously published an important study comparing the fiction of Virginia Woolf, Andre Gide, and Hesse.This biography is a standard against which any future biographies are likely to be judged, composed by a man who has studied the author for many years. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Astonishing Collection
This selection of 23 stories (20 available in English for the first time) offers a spectrum of Hesse's writing from 1899 to 1948 that could be matched only by an edition of his poetry, since in no other form -- novel, essay, autobiographical reflection -- did he span so many years. Here, within the covers of a single volume, the reader can trace Hesse's development from the aestheticism of his youth through the realism and surrealism of the next decades to the classicism of his old age. And the reader who knows Hesse mainly through his major novels of the twenties and thirties will be surprised to encounter him in a variety of new incarnations. Yet the greatest surprise is to see how faithful he remained to his essential self from first to last. Even as he tests and discards literary modes, he consistently rejects external "reality" for the sake of an inner world created by imagination.

This obsession with expressing his own consciousness is paralleled by criticism of the world he is fleeing from. In the earliest stories, such critiques amount to an attempt to epater le bourgeois. Later, in stories like "The Homecoming," the malice and corruption of society are forcefully unmasked. In the parable "Harry, the Steppenwolf" (1928), Hesse even ridicules the attitude we recognize today as "radical chic."

But all his stories, as Hesse himself realized, are concerned primarily with his own secret dreams, his own bitter anguish. Stories of Five Decades, arranged in chronological order, is a rewarding display of the full range of this storytelling as it blossomed over a lifetime. ... Read more