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[fpb]

inverarity's review of Steppenwolf reminded me of the pleasure that more than one of Hermann Hesse's books had given me. Now my whole shelf of German literature was lost in the Move from Hell, and space here is at a premium, so I decided to get a few e-copies of my favourites - The Journey to the East, Narziss and Goldmund, The Glass Bead Game and

Comments

[fellmama]

Have you read any Robertson Davies? I think you would like him.

Incidentally, I once picked up a ranty-type book that claimed to be feminist in outlook. The acknowledgments page referred, among others, to the author's father and Robert Graves as men who didn't suck--I'm paraphrasing that last. Praising a man who treated the women in his life with nothing but contempt as feminist . . . well, it certainly told me the worth of her opinion, I suppose.

[fpb]

When Robert Graves died, in 1985, I was in St.John's College, Oxford - the same where he had been educated. There was, alas, a chapel commemoration, and I absolutely refused to go. Not only for the indecency - an indecency matched and redoubled in later occasions, alas - of giving Christian ritual and a Christian sacred building to the celebration of a man with his views, but above all because I was and remain convinced that The White Goddess is a deliberately evil book. The effect of the First World War, on many people who experienced it at the front line, was to have them go "Evil be thou my good." Mussolini rejected his humanitarian socialism and pacifism, and reinvented himself as a leader of thugs; and in the same way, Graves, who like Mussolini came from a "progressive" and anti-Christian background, said "goodbye to all that" and turned a genuinely prodigious lyrical talent to the service of homicidal nonsense. The celebration of human sacrifice and of shedding human blood in the name of his "Goddess" in its closing

[fellmama]

I think a lot of people confuse being powerful with being right. I can see why second-wave feminists in particular would seize on something that fulfilled their need for the feminine in the divine. But! . . .

[vasma_pr]

I remember reading a book on Hermann Hesse's life written by some french authors. I was struck how pathetic they put everything that in Hesse's prose was quite natural and poetic. It was extremely difficult for me to get through the book....