Hesse's best writing
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...I cannot say enough great things about this collection of "Marchen" ("Fairy Tales") by Hermann Hesse. Unlike his earlier work which can be interpretted fairly literally, with this collection and the novel "Demian," which were originally published the same year and written when Hesse first went into his self-impossed exile and began ungergoing psychoanalysis, the line between fanatasy-reality, dreaming-alertness has been blurred completely. These storeis are concerned with dream worlds, the subconscious, magical thiking, and the numinous experience of the soul. Their subject: the distilling of wisdom. Obviously, not for those who can't handle anything other than a Danielle Steele or Ian Rankin "novel"! Excellent collection of eight classic Hesse stories. A must have.
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Unusual, enigmatic.
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Hesse is a strange writer. These short stories are at times beautiful, but more often dark, and unsettlingly other-worldly. The themes his stories examine are those of rejection, loss, and the transition from child to adult, and eventual decay, but the message is so bound up in fantasy, and the emotional behaviour of his characters so divorced from the real that occasionally all meaning suddenly appears lost, and the worlds these figures inhabit, and the figures themselves crumble and become meaningless.
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