Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair’s Youth by Hermann Hesse
My rating: 4/5 cats
i am so glad i give authors three books to make me love them. this was hesse’s last chance to woo me, and he really almost got a five-starcat valentine from me, but we will call it a four and a half—must be a little coy, after all. this is a book that i would love to go back in time and give myself upon graduating from high school. i would love to know whether it would have made me more or less insufferable than i am now. because i could see it going either way, at seventeen. i could see myself taking this as a cautionary tale, in a way, or i could see myself going whole hog into some sort of mystical, quasi-intellectual liter-orgical spree and alienating everyone around me. i can see myself smoking a pipe and holding court with my philosophies and my revelations ohhhh my revelations. as it is, i held no court—i just finished it on the subway, took moll flanders out of my bag, and started reading that, in some quiet bookish equivalent to chain-smoking. but o what could have been…
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