What Do I Read Next?
Last Updated on July 29, 2019, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 477
- The oldest speculative literature of the Hindus is the Upanishads, composed between 600 B.C. to 300 B.C. It is a collection of works on the nature of man and the universe.
- The Bhagavad Gita is part of the great Hindu epic the Mahabharata and has been called the New Testament of Hinduism. This discussion on the nature and meaning of life between the god Krishna, who appears as a charioteer, and Arjuna, a warrior about to go into battle, has had substantial impact on Western thought.
- The writer of Ecclesiastes, a book of the Old Testament, portrays his search for the meaning of life, his sense that all is vanity, and his own conclusions in his old age.
- Goethe's Faust, an 1808 play based on the legend of a German necromancer, Georg Faust, focuses on an old scholar who yearns to have not so much all knowledge but all experience. In order to do so, he must promise his immortal soul to the destructive tempting spirit, Mephistopheles.
- A different look at India is provided in E. M. Forster's 1924 novel, A Passage to India. The novel is notable for its strong mystical flavor and its treatment of Indian religions, including Islam and Hinduism.
- With the publication in 1904 of Peter Camenzind (translated 1961), Hesse established himself as an important German writer by winning the Bauernfeld Prize of Vienna. It is a poetic/realistic narrative of the gauche and inhibited misfit Camenzind and, in many ways, is Hesse's own veiled literary self-disclosure of his life in Basel.
- Demian was written by Hesse in 1919 and translated into English in 1923. The novel is a bildungsroman featuring Emil Sinclair, a young man who is troubled by life's conflicting forces. A mysterious boy, Max Demian, tells him of the devil-god Abraxas, who is the embodiment of good and evil.
- Hesse's 1927 novel, Steppenwolf, was translated into English two years later. It is a treatment of the artist as an outsider, a common theme in Hesse's fiction. Torn between his own frustrated artistic realism and the inhuman nature of modern reality, Harry Haller thinks of himself as a wolf of the Steppes.
- Many of Hesse's works focus on the interaction between characters with opposing temperaments. In his 1930 novel, Narcissus and Goldmund (translated 1932), the title characters represent, respectively, spirit and life. Set in a medieval monastery, half of this novel follows the friendship of the introverted, ascetic Narcissus and the extroverted sculptor Goldmund; the other half chronicles the latter's hedonistic adventures outside the cloister.
- Another Hesse bildungsroman, Magister Ludi: (The Glass-Bead Game) was written in 1943 and was translated in 1949. Josef Knecht lives in a utopian society of the twenty-third century that is dominated by a glass-bead game practiced in its highest form by an intellectual elite. Knecht eventually dies after departing to the outer world, the tragic result of a life dedicated entirely to the world of the spirit.
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