Narcissus and Goldmund

Literature & Fiction

Hesse, H.

Contemporary

Peter Owen Ltd

The Prodigy

The Prodigy, originally dating from 1905, is Hermann Hesses's bitter indictment of conventional education. It is the story of Hans Giebenrath, the brilliant young son of provincial bourgeouis in southern Germany who becomes the first boy from his town to pass into a prestigious Protestant theological college. His spirit, however, is systematically broken by his parents and teachers; over anxious about his success, they forget to consider his health and happiness. Subsiding into a fatal apathy, he is taken home for medical reasons. Here he falls in love, becomes an engineer's apprentice, learns to drink alcohol and eventually dies by drowning. Out of his attitude to the treatment that he perceived was common within the German schooling system at the turn of the century, Hesse developed his own deeply personal views on the value of Eastern education in developing the self.

Hermann, Hesse

Classics

The Great Digest / Unwobbling

CONFUCIUS

Depicting the hopeless, emotional polarity of a young couple, this novel follows their doomed marriage spent in a remote, tropical hell. She—described only as "the girl"—is young, sophisticated and sensitive. He, "Mr. Dog-Head," is an unreconstructed thug and heavy drinker who rapes his wife, otherwise passing his time bludgeoning rats with a tennis racket. Together with a visiting stranger, "Suede Boots"—who urges the woman to escape until he is banished by her husband—these characters live through the same situations twice. Their identities are equally real—or unreal—in each case. With slight variation in the background and the novel's atmosphere, neither the outcome nor the characters themselves are quite the same the second time. The constant question of the jungle "brain-lever" bird remains unanswered: who are you?

Who Are You?

Kavan, Anna

Literary

Erte: Things I Remember

Arts & Photography

Erté

Performing Arts

Collectively the works of Samuel Beckett, winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature, reveal a remarkable continuity of theme. Together his writings present a particular view of life and each novel constitutes part of a larger whole.

Samuel Beckett : Study Of Nove

Webb, Eugene

Three Lives

Gertrude Stein

These linked novels have been rated among the finest of Colette's work. Duo is the story of Alice and Michel, whose marriage is foundering due to Alice's infidelity. In Le Toutounier, Alice has moved to Paris after Michel's death. There she and her two sisters live in a shabby apartment; fiercely independent, reticent, and hard-working, they speak a private language and seek comfort in the indestructible sofa (toutounier) of their childhood.

Duo & Le Toutounier

COLETTE

Although Anais Nin found in her diaries a profound mode of self-creation and confession, she could not reveal this intimate record of her own experiences during her lifetime. Instead, she turned to fiction, where her stories and novels became artistic "distillations" of her secret diaries. A Spy in the House of Love, whose heroine Sabina is deeply divided between her drive for artistic and sexual expression, on the one hand, and social restrictions and self-created inhibitions, on the other, echoed Nin's personal struggle with sex, love, and emotional fragmentation. Written when Nin's own life was taut with conflicting loyalties, her protagonist Sabina repeatedly asks herself, can one indulge in one's sensual restlessness, the fantasies, the relentless need for adventure without devastating consequences?

Spy In The House Of Love

Nin, Anaïs

<p>The nameless narrator this, Pavese's last and greatest novel, returns to Italy from California after the Second World War. He has done well in America, but success hasn't taken the edge off his memories of childhood, when he was an orphan living at the mercy of a bitterly poor farmer. He wants to learn what happened in his native village over the long, terrible years of Fascism; perhaps, he even thinks, he will settle down. And yet as he uncovers a secret and savage history from the war-a tale of betrayal and reprisal, sex and death-he finds that the past still haunts the present.</p>

The moon and the bonfire

CESARE PAVESE

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