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Jan 17, 2011

Paquita Maria rated it:

Star-ratings are funny little things.* At the risk of putting words into your collective binary mouth, let me tell you how it goes with a (for loss of a better word) "good" book...you know, one that you finish all too quickly and must lick your fingers and frantically flip back several pages in order to absorb the end once more, this time wholly, slowly, meditatively. At last accepting that you have experienced the novel's final message, that final flash of imagery both resolute and i More...

24 comments like (31 people liked it)

Apr 11, 2011

RandomAnthony rated it:

Hermann Hesse's Demian influenced me more than just about any book although I haven't read the novel in twenty years. Through my late teens and early twenties I searched out every Hesse book I could find, including the rarities, journals, letters, etc., going as far as to ferret out European editions in a Berlin bookstore on a solo trip as much influenced by Hesse as cheap airfare. My initial college experiences (three institutions in six semesters) ended badly. I became depressed and, althou More...

13 comments like (38 people liked it)

Jul 30, 2009

karen rated it:

i am so glad i give authors three books to make me love them. this was hesses last chance to woo me, and he really almost got a five-star valentine from me, but we will call it a four and a half - must be a little coy, after all. this is a book that i would love to go back in time and give myself upon graduating from high school. i would love to know whether it would have made me more or less insufferable than i am now. because i could see it going either way, at seventeen. i could see myself ta More...

16 comments like (27 people liked it)

May 05, 2008

Maggie rated it:

Ugh. I forced myself to finish this short book and, in the end, felt it wasn't worth the trouble. I picked it up because I loved Siddhartha so much (though it's been years since I read it and now I wonder if it it will hold up). I found Demian terribly melodramatic and over-wrought and I could never really begin to care much about Sinclair and all his angst-ridden inner turmoil. There were a few interesting and lovely passages -- only a couple of times did I feel a thrill of poetry in the langua More...

1 comment like (5 people liked it)

Oct 02, 2007

Brooke rated it:

Demian...............how lucky people are who are so inclined to constantly be searching as are the characters in this book! How much they discover, how many emotions they feel, how incredibly inspiring they are. I loved this book because I love passionate people.

1 comment like (10 people liked it)

Dec 22, 2011

Matt rated it:

I had high expectations for Demian, mostly due to my adoration of Hesse's other novel, Siddartha. I was ready for a book with no real plot, driven by the development of a single character. Demian delivered these things, but in an ultimately disappointing way.

Like Siddartha, Sinclair, Demian's protagonist, begins the novel in the world of his parents. He is on a path to fulfill their ideal of success, and then for one reason or another, deviates from that path. Where Siddartha is More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 30, 2011

Mashael rated it:

- يقول هرمان هسه :
لمْ أكن أريدُ إلا أن أعيش وفــقَ الدوافع التي تَـنبٌع منْ نفسي الحقيقية , فلم كان ذلك بهذه الصعوبة ؟؟؟؟
,

سبحة بشعة من حجارة رديئة الشكل كلما همَّ “سنكلير” ذو العاشرة من العمر لـ يفرطها ليرتاح زاده الخوفُ حجارةً أخرى في سلسلةٍ منْ الأخطاءِ قادته إليها كذبةٌ صغيرةٌ اخترعها لأنه أراد أن يكونَ بطلاً لمدة دقائق بين أقرانه يحسبها عقله الصغير بأنها نهايةُ العالم وبدايةُ دخوله في “عالم الأشرار”المخيف,أصبحت أغلالاً قضّت مضجعة وربما تلك الذنوب البسيطة قادته ليكون دائما More...

3 comments like (3 people liked it)

Mar 28, 2008

Sophia rated it:

I appreciate Demian for its insight, for the beautiful way in which it's written, for the forward thinking of its time, and for its resemblance to Hesse's life.

Although conversations often feel unreal, the conversations are incidental. Like Sarte's plays, it's more about conveying the philosophy, so the narrative grants an element of experience to the ideas.
It's what Faust argues with Mephistopheles---the duality between reading about something and experiencing it.
The na More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Jul 26, 2007

Lena rated it:

This book was one of my first introductions to the idea of following an unconventional spiritual path. Rereading it recently, I found the story of how Max Demian guided the young Emil Sinclair away from his familiar world and into the pursuit of spiritual fulfillment just as engrossing as I had the first time.

I was also struck by how similar Demian’s message was to so many modern spiritual teachers today. The idea that he and Sinclair were among a select few with the courage to b More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 01, 2008

Shivering William rated it:

A tale of the young practicing magician.

Hesse's books tend to draw parallels between everything I'm experiencing and reading . . . Choke, The Mindscape of Alan Moore, Dreams and Wishes, my own story of the Purgatory Pioneer.

It's in times when I'm pressured to get a steady job, insurance, salary, etc., that this book really works his magic. Every person must follow their own path no matter how isolated it makes them. It is only then that you're doing the universe's will. More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Feb 02, 2012

Chy rated it:

In Goodreads Member Paquita Maria Sanchez's GR review of it, she pegged a good chunk of my experience with this book. Like here:

...this book is a five star for me personally. TODAY. I largely chalk this up to the cosmos aligning in pitch-perfect timing in my choosing to read it. Maybe I will change my mind one day. Maybe you will read it and feel that I've read too much into it.

When I started this book, I was sighing a lot because Sinclair goes on and on (and on) about this ex More...

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Oct 24, 2011

Sara rated it:

Picked up among the books people brought to me for my Book&Coffee. Monday is a slow day for business around my place so, since I had to spend several hours at the local, I choose it for spend the time. I didn't read any Hesse so I didn't really knew what to expect, I only knew that many readers like him, so I gave it a try. In the first few pages I had a strange feeling, like of something that I had already read, or felt, something I knew well. Then I realized that somewhere along the path of my More...

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Sep 11, 2011

Stephen rated it:

It is always interesting, and sometimes disappointing, to go back to authors one admired decades earlier. I read a fair amount of Herman Hesse as a college student and then later as a graduate student of Helmut Wilhelm at the University of Washington. My teacher's father, the eminent German sinologist Richard Wilhelm, had known both Hesse and C.G. Jung personally and in fact was supposedly the model for one of Hesse's characters in "The Glass Bead Game." So I decided recently to rer More...

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May 31, 2011

Nick rated it:

Hesse strikes again for me! I remember doing a project in high school about picking a quote out from... something (Emerson, it seems)... and I chose "every heart vibrates to that iron string." Sort of adopting the idea of focus on what you love. I also got something like this idea from The Fountainhead when I read it a while ago, and see it in many other things as I go. And also Colbert in Strangers with Candy (I think): "I wasn't pushing you away, I was pulling me towards myself. More...

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May 11, 2011

Summer rated it:

Wow. Very weird to me, coming from a religious standpoint. Very mystical. Very soul-searchy. The story of a boy trying to grow up and choose his own moral guide in a world full of the unacknowledged hypocrisy of the purity of religion and the darkness of our own souls. Of course, I did pull a dozen and a half interesting quotes (roughly one per ten pages). It is a very good discussion book. Especially when you take quotes you like but then follow the next few sentences and go 'What?!?'
p.1: More...

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Mar 23, 2011

Mariel rated it:

Emil Sinclair's story, as told, of his spiritual yearn for faith in a love and power other than himself read to me as willful brainwashing. Wanting to see, making belief...

I read Herman Hesse's Demian circa my reading of Jean Genet's The Thief's Journal. It is blowing my mind. (I'm making explosion sounds with my mouth as I type this.) Every thing that happens, the feeling as action, existing on emotional planes of thought, the world as two halves of light and dark [Mariel says: it More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 01, 2011

Dimitris rated it:

I had high hopes for this book. Quotes like "the bird fights its way out of the egg" or "true freedom requires the destruction of the world we were born in" (or something akin to that) intrigued me. But I must say Demian disappointed me in the end. Sinclair's life comes across as drama-queenish and dull. His fascination with Demian is kind of peculiar and arbitrary, while Demian himself is uncanny and not very "realistic" a character at all. I enjoyed reading it mor More...

0 comments like

Jan 10, 2011

Aries rated it:

Existentialist writings have an irresistable aura. Those proponents always question the legitimacy of authority, they like to think outside the box. They are seen as creative but very difficult people to be around with.

Emil Sinclair is such a rebel. In Hermann Hesse's novel Demian, Emil realized he didn't want to follow the herd instinct anymore -- everyone just does what the society or norms tell him or her what to do and what not to do. Somehow, "the herd" genuinely enjoy More...

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Nov 29, 2010

Teji rated it:

“But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomenon intersect only once in this way and never again…Each man’s life represents a road toward himself…” p 3-4
“Such age old stories are always true but they aren’t always properly recorded and aren’t always given correct interpretations.” p25

“A stone had been dropped into the well, the well was my youthful soul.” P27
More...

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Oct 19, 2010

Cornerofmadness rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 24, 2010

Matt rated it:

This book, a short but complex and provoking read, follows the early life of Emil Sinclair, the product of a well to do family who increasingly becomes interconnected with the other major character in the book, Max Demian. Set in pre World War I Germany, the book examines the character of a person who becomes increasingly disillusioned with standards he believes are set by his family and society.

Emil first meets Max Demian at a young age, at around the same moment Emil, who considers h More...

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Aug 11, 2009

Elizabeth rated it:

I really enjoyed this book--although I could see being annoyed with it for possible narcissistic interpretations (as for eg: Catcher in the Rye is now annoying since I'm no longer 17). There is much universal truth of the human experience (can I say that?) to be discovered by the reader as s/he follows Sinclair's searching journey to selfhood. It not only resonates with the angst of WWI context in which it was written, but as per the "universality" of humans trying to become--to be a h More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 22, 2009

Roxy rated it:

I just completed the most incredible book I have ever read. At least right now, only minutes after finished pouring myself into its words for the past two days (in which I read it front to back), that is what I think... That this is the most special, enlightening, beautiful, peaceful, entrancing...almost holy books I have ever, ever read. Right now I feel this odd understanding and contentment in my stomach, heart, and mind. It might sound cheesy, but everything about this book was perfect. I re More...

3 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jul 31, 2011

Patrick rated it:

Despite its enduring popularity (almost a hundred years), this novel is certainly not among Hesse's best. Okay, BEHAVE!—I love Hesse. The author's painful, overriding preoccupation with his own emotions (which in novels like Narcissus and Goldmund and Siddartha is transformed into high art) here becomes blatant, self-indulgent, adolescent, and ultimately rather irritating. The novel starts out promisingly and provides some very powerful images, but after a few chapters it begins to degenerate in More...

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Jul 28, 2011

Nemesis rated it:

Non so, sono perplessa.
Probabilmente è colpa mia, ma Herman Hesse non riesco proprio a capirlo.
Un libro di formazione, l’ennesimo dopo “Siddartha”, “Narciso e Boccadoro”, “Peter Camenzind”, l’ennesima storia, un uomo alla continua ricerca di se stesso e del suo “senso della vita”, eternamente diviso tra ciò che è bene e ciò che è male, l’ennesimo epilogo che alla fine non viene a capo di nulla, che ti lascia con l’amaro in bocca.
Mi sembra la versione filosofica de “l’amico ritr More...

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Mar 14, 2011

Ben rated it:

If only, for the sake of this review, I could wield Hesse's magically poetic pen; the one he keeps safely locked in his desk drawer, I might be able to properly dictate my thoughts on this work. Alas, I don't. So forgive the disorganization of my writing to follow.

I will start with my first reaction to Demian; which really dominated my reading through the first half of the novel. I have skimmed through some other reviews on this book which typified it as melodramatic; a Buildings Roma More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 10, 2011

Nick rated it:

I read this book on a friend's recommendation. A bildungsroman marked by mysterious, crypto-gnostic characterizations and homoerotic tension... heh, as if a bildungsroman could ever lack THAT. The book's treatment of magic and the shadow-archetypes are really cool, as is the psychological explanation of Cain's mysterious mark. I won't spoil it.

But I feel that this book, like so many totalizing modernist works, fails to take it to the max. Why? Because of a perspective that only looks More...

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Dec 30, 2011

Chris rated it:

The description of this book, particularly that Sinclair enters "a secret and dangerous world of petty crime and revolt against convention" is completely off base and misleading. This is a deeply philosophical and spiritual book about finding one's self--giving birth to one's self--within the larger organism of humanity. It was in part based on some of what Hesse when through as a young man. Within the space of a few crystal clear sentences scattered here and there throughout Sinclair' More...

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Jul 03, 2011

Fernanda rated it:

Este libro fue tan Narciso y Goldmundo, aunque siendo correctos, Narciso y Goldmundo es muy Demian. Esta novela es una experiencia similar, dos personajes que se encuentran, que son iguales y distintos, que tienen una marca que los une y ambos emprenden un viaje espiritual donde uno de ellos, aquel que debe emprender su camino y descubrirse, pasa por un sin fin de travesías personales, luchas interminables dentro de si mismo no dejan de suceder durante todo el libro.

Esta obra es una More...

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Dec 08, 2011

Carlos rated it:

Este libro sin duda ha sido un descubrimiento para mi. Comencé a leer Ël lobo estepario- y lo tuve que poner en "hold" por un tiempo. Un libro muy denso.
Por lo tanto ya con el interés en leer algo de Hermann Hesse, me encontrè con "Demian", y vaya que descubrimiento !. Me ha encantado...

Es la historia de un niño, después adolescente, y por último joven, en la transición de entre todas estas etapas. Buscando una identidad, encontrandose así mismo, y perdiend More...

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