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cyberspace junkyard

Monday, May 19, 2003


Stop reading junk!
... is what a good friend told me last night over dinner. I'm crushed. All my beloved fantasy series? Junk? Give me a moment while I recover.

I decided to take him up on his offer to educate me in the true genius of European and Japanese writers, so I'm starting on Hermann Hesse's Narziss and Goldmund, which is only 300 or so pages long, a booklet, compared to the 900 page sagas I'm used to! The blurb at the back reads

In a sense, both Narziss and Goldmund - the ascetic and the Dionaysian - are what Hermann Hesse might have been. Narziss is a teacher at Mariabronn, a monastery in medieval Germany. Brilliant and severe, he feels that Goldmund, his favourite pupil, will never be a scholar or a monk. So Narziss helps Goldmund realize that they must each fulfil themselves in different ways: Narziss retiring from the world into a patterned order of prayer and philosophy while Goldmund quits the cloisters to plunge into a sea of blood and lust; cutting a picaresque swathe through plague, storm and murder; always chasing a fugitive vision of artistic perfections, its form 'the mother of all things'.
Uh-huh. Wish me luck!


 # posted by Vron @ 11:41 am

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