Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse

Simon at Stuck in a Book commented here at bookconscious recently and I checked out his blog. When I saw the #1930club post, I looked around at my shelves and realized I had a to-read novel, Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse, which was published in 1930.

I think I first heard about it on The Readers and I bought it with a gift card when I left my previous library job. That was about a year and a half ago, but sometimes I think books recede into the shelves until the time is right. I hadn’t read anything else by Hermann Hesse but noticed in the author bio in my ugly little mass market paperback that he won the Nobel prize for literature in 1946. As the world contemplates the bizarre 2018/2019 announcement, marred first by last year’s prize being delayed by scandal and then by accusations that the 2019 winner is “an apologist for genocide,” I read this strange and beautiful book about two motherless medieval men and their search for meaning.

Narcissus and Goldmund is set in a cloistered monastery in Germany, where Goldmund, a fair haired and sweet natured boy, is left by his father to study and prepare to enter monastic life. His teacher is younger than most, still training to be a priest himself, an intelligent and preternaturally observant man named Narcissus. As Goldmund reaches the end of his formal education, Narcissus tells him plainly that his calling isn’t scholarship or the priesthood. He conjures memories of Goldmund’s loving but faithless mother and brings back the pain of her abandonment.

After this crisis, Goldmund’s leaves the cloister on a years long journey of pleasure, responsible to no one, loving as many women as he can, skirting a possible calling in favor of wandering. I’ll leave the details for you to read but suffice to say he has plenty to confess to years later, when he’s in a real scrape and Narcissus manages to rescue him.

They return to the monastery and have a series of conversations about when people can realize their true selves, the role of ideas versus images, whether thinking and ideas are worth anything on their own or are made worthy when they are applied to life’s challenges, and more. Goldmund tries a more settled life and work, and the book’s final crisis leaves both men more aware of who they are and what they mean to each other.

The story feels less like a novel than an allegory, as many key details point to ideas about love, friendship, caring, faith, sin, bigotry, greed, selfishness. The role of nature and study in developing one’s identity, the purpose of art and ideas, and the benefits of ritual and discipline are also among Hesse’s topics. It’s an old fashioned tale, a little more male-centric than I’m used to reading, with women only playing the roles of temptresses or virgins.

Still it was a good read, and Hesse’s writing is powerful and descriptive. Take this passage where Goldmund has come across a house where all the occupants are dead of plague:

“How sad and ghostlike was this small home, with the remains of the hearthfire still glowing, inhabited by corpses, completely filled with death, penetrated by death. . . . What other people performed in the privacy of their coffins, in the graves, well hidden and invisible, the last and poorest performance, this falling apart and decaying, was performed here at home by five people in their rooms, in broad daylight, behind an unlocked door, thoughtlessly, shamelessly, vulnerably. Goldmund had seen many corpses before but never an example like this of the merciless workings of death. Deeply he studied it.”

Pretty vivid. I’m glad I picked it up and that the #1930club gave me reason to read it.

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Discussion reads

I read The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and To Darkness and to Death by Julia Spencer Fleming, one for book club and one for another group discussion. Rather than talk about those books specifically — what can I possibly say that hasn’t been said about Toni Morrison? And why review a mystery that is several books into a series? — I thought I’d muse on reading books other people have chosen.

We do it for years as children, reading what teachers tell us to, or choosing from a prescribed list. I hated it when I volunteered in the children’s room in a public library when my kids were small and a child would come in with a parent who wanted the child to read a book worth certain points; when I was young, my mother would turn us loose at the library to choose whatever we wanted and I can remember a delicious sense of agency and freedom, wandering the rows of shelves, exploring my options. I feel one way to turn a kid off of reading is to be prescriptive about what they have to read.

I’ve worked in different settings where I had to read either ahead of an author visit or in order to facilitate a book club and at one point here at bookconscious I wrote about my husband’s observation that reading wasn’t even fun for me anymore. Reading for work is slightly different. I choose to be a part of various discussion groups now, even though there will be months where I don’t like the selection.

Why? I feel like the act of following through with reading something I wouldn’t necessarily pick myself and/or that isn’t what I like to read, or even, occasionally, that I flat out don’t enjoy is about choosing community and expanding my horizons. Sometimes I still don’t like it even after the discussion, but sometimes I see new things in a book after I hear other’ views. Of course sometimes people don’t like a book I recommended, and so reading their recommendations is partly an acknowledgement that committing to a discussion group or book club is about trusting the process of collaborating on choices, and listening to others’ views.

Happily there are times when I end up reading something I am very glad to have read. Or that I didn’t enjoy but know was good for me to read anyway, and can appreciate for its power or beauty (The Bluest Eye falls into that category). But whether or not I enjoy a particular book, I think that showing up — to read and to discuss — is worth doing, because the experience of seeing the world through someone else’s eyes, both in the text and in the group, is worth my time and makes life richer.

 

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