An Existentialist intensity and a depth of understanding rare in contemporary fiction.
Demian
Narrated by Jason McCoy
Hermann HesseUnabridged — 5 hours, 13 minutes
Demian
Narrated by Jason McCoy
Hermann HesseUnabridged — 5 hours, 13 minutes
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Overview
Editorial Reviews
Hesse is a writer whose peculiar vision is worth inspecting. His world is shadowy and close to areas of the heart that will probably never see light. But his vision is a rare one, as commendable for its humane solicitude as for its strangeness and unearthly color.” — National Review
"What Catcher in the Rye has come to mean for America's younger generation, Demian proved to be for Germany's early post-WWI youth. . . . A quite believable, fascinating, moving portrait of youth." — Kirkus Reviews
Hesse is a writer whose peculiar vision is worth inspecting. His world is shadowy and close to areas of the heart that will probably never see light. But his vision is a rare one, as commendable for its humane solicitude as for its strangeness and unearthly color.
Hesse is a writer whose peculiar vision is worth inspecting. His world is shadowy and close to areas of the heart that will probably never see light. But his vision is a rare one, as commendable for its humane solicitude as for its strangeness and unearthly color.
As faces or body types can seem to belong to a particular era—the 1890s, 1920s, modern day—so can voices. Hesse's 1919 semi-fantastical coming-of-age novel about the psychological and spiritual growth of a mystic could easily be made to sound archaic and European. But Jeff Woodman's voice is contemporary and American, making the book sound very much of our time. The familiar tone of his voice risks banality, but his vocal ability and skill more than compensate by making the book accessible and vivid. He gives each passage appropriate emotional weight—never too much—and varies voices distinctively but with subtlety. Woodman delivers a brisk, bright, attractive reading of a book that, at times mysterious, even arcane, is here well rendered for modern listeners. W.M. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
Product Details
BN ID: | 2940177071572 |
---|---|
Publisher: | HN Publishing |
Publication date: | 10/10/2019 |
Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
I cannot tell my story without reaching a long way back. If it were possible I would reach back farther still-into the very first years of my childhood, and beyond them into distant ancestral past.Novelists when they write novels tend to take an almost godlike attitude toward their subject, pretending to a total comprehension of the story, a man's life, which they can therefore recount as GodHimself might, nothing standing between them and the naked truth, the entire story meaningful in every detail. I am as little able to do this as the novelist is, even though my story is more important to me than any novelist's is to biro for this is my story; it is the story of a man, not of an invented, or possible, or idealized, or otherwise absent figure, but of a unique being of flesh and blood. Yet, what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any time before, and meneach one of whom represents a unique and valuable experiment on the part of natureare therefore shot wholesale nowadays. If ire were not something more than unique human beings, if each one of us could really be done away with once and for all by a single bullet, storytelling would lose all purpose. But every man is more than just himself he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again. That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, withineach one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.
Few people nowadays know what man is. Many sense this ignorance and die the more easily because of it, the same way that I will die more easily once I have completed this story.
I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me. My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreamslike the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves.
Each man's life represents a road toward himself, an attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path. No man has ever been entirely and completely himself. Yet each one strives to become that-one in an awkward, the other in a more intelligent way, each as best he can. Each man carries the vestiges of his birththe slime and eggshells of his primeval pastwith him to the end of his days. Some never become human, remaining frog, lizard, ant. Some are human above the waist, fish below. Each represents a gamble on the part of nature in creation of the human. We all share the same origin, our mothers; all of us come in at the same door. But each of usexperiments of the depthsstrives toward his own destiny. We can understand one another; but each of us is able to interpret himself to himself alone.