Demian
1919
- teenage boys
- translations into english
- bildungsromans
- fiction
- german fiction
- germany
- bildungsroman
- social conditions
- translations into portuguese
- portuguese fiction
The story
A young man awakens to selfhood and to a world of possibilities beyond the conventions of his upbringing in Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse’s beloved novel Demian. Emil Sinclair is a quiet boy drawn into a forbidden yet seductive realm of petty crime and defiance. His guide is his precocious, mysterious classmate Max Demian, who provokes in Emil a search for self-discovery and spiritual fulfillment. A brilliant psychological portrait, Demian is given new life in this translation, which together with James Franco’s personal and inspiring foreword will bring a new generation to Hesse’s widely influential coming-of-age novel.
What it’s like
Dense, interior prose with a confessional first-person voice, the kind that circles the same ideas in long, searching sentences and lingers on dreams, half-glimpsed faces and the charged silence of a provincial German town before the First World War. The mood is brooding and feverish but not chaotic: a slow, reflective ache, with dusk-lit streets, church bells, dim schoolrooms and private rooms full of smoke and old books. Nothing is loud. The emotional register is one of yearning and unease, the sense of a self pressing against its own borders, and the pacing is contemplative, driven by thought more than action. Its intensity is low: a few minor transgressions, petty theft and a fight, and a bleak undercurrent of adolescent cruelty and war at the edges, but no gore and no sexual content. It suits a late evening alone, a slow autumn reading, or a reader who wants a novel that thinks out loud. It is for people who love introspective coming-of-age stories, Hesse's symbolic, ruminative style, and books that treat inner life as the real landscape.
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