Review by Choice Review
With this translation into English, Decker's 2012 biography of Hermann Hesse (1877--1962), the 1946 Nobel laureate and recipient of the Goethe Prize, is now the definitive English-language account of Hesse's life. Every author's work is determined to some extent by life experiences. Hesse's oeuvre manifests this truth to a high degree. Decker exploits this phenomenon by providing intimate details of Hesse's life and looking at how they explain the author's unique place in 20th-century literature. In doing so Decker reveals Hesse's faults and his eccentricities: his disdain of women (especially his three wives), his neutral positions on important political issues, his misunderstood antiwar stance, his extreme honesty in relationships with friends and enemies, his kindness to perfect strangers, and his Manichean struggle (going back to his childhood) with pietistic parents who neither understood nor tolerated their gifted and rebellious son and so drove him into depression, a mental institution, and suicide attempts. His troubled upbringing affected his sexuality late into his life. Not even years of psychoanalysis solved his problems. Only his compulsive writing saved him from his demons and enabled him to attain a ripe old age. Decker makes clear that Hesse's restless soul was the basis of his books, which spoke to many people around the world. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Robert C. Conard, emeritus, University of Dayton
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Biographer Decker (Francis von Assisi) offers what will likely be the definitive biography of German author Hermann Hesse (1877-1962). Keen to trace the autobiographical elements in Hesse's writings, Decker gives a nuanced study of his subject as, variously, a youth rebelling against his parents' devoutly religious beliefs to devote himself to art; an intellectual skeptical of the rhetoric driving two world wars; and a choleric expatriate who "spent most of his life living in Switzerland," despised fame (winning the Nobel Prize, Hesse lamented, only made "my life four times more onerous than previously"), and could barely tolerate people. Decker also intertwines observations on Hesse's unique spiritual convictions-a pantheism drawn from Goethe, an interest in Eastern philosophy expressed most clearly in Siddhartha, and a late Romantic humanism-with his own headily philosophical reflections on literature and art (e.g., "It is the mythical dimensions of reality, the truth of the legend, that literature lays bare"). In Hesse's private life, he explores Hesse's pain over being deprived of affection from his mother, who scorned his work as sinful, and his deeply contradictory nature, which combined a longing for admiration with an aversion to intimacy. Decker restores depth and context to an author much maligned in his own time and much misinterpreted by later eras. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Library Journal Review
German-born novelist, painter, and poet Herman Hesse, awarded the Nobel Prize in 1946, has retained a consistently loyal readership in North America. His novels Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and Demian were popular in the mid-Sixties and Seventies and are still in print. However, there's been no substantial English biography of Hesse since 1978, and this latest portrait from Decker, biographer of Francis of Assisi, Vincent van Gogh, Rainer Maria Rilke, among others, will not be superseded for some time. Rather than a meticulously detailed cradle-to-crypt account, Decker fashions a fulsome literary study, quoting extensively from Hesse's poetry and fiction positioned within the context of the author's life. Hesse's troubled childhood and adolescence were direct results of his persistent defiance of his parents' stringent pietist Protestant beliefs and traditions. Consequently, writing became an affirmation of self-reliance and an escape from the problematic real world. This rebellious independence is manifest in his recurring literary motif of the restless seeker or wanderer in search of his true Self and his exploration of Eastern asceticism and spiritualism. VERDICT For all literature collections and Hesse stalwarts.-Lonnie Weatherby, McGill Univ. Lib., Montreal © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 beliefsso 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 novelsDemian, 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
