Demian (original 1919; edition 1966)

For 75% of the book I had this feeling everything was familiar. Then I realized this is basically the precursor for [b:The Witch Of Portobello|816720|The Witch Of Portobello|Paulo Coelho|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1178654373s/816720.jpg|13855759] by [a:Paulo Coelho|566|Paulo Coelho|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1201840056p2/566.jpg]. I enjoyed this one slightly more, but still was left feeling blah at the end. ( )

"A ave sai do ovo. O ovo é o mundo. Quem quiser nascer ter que destruir um mundo." ( )

Demian is the story of Emil Sinclair, a boy who doesn't fit in with the other boys, his family, or society in general, and how he comes to embrace his uniqueness as he grows into adulthood with the help of another oddball named Max Demian. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, the latter part of the novel consists mainly in a lot of self-congratulatory mutual back-patting about how special they are, along with Max's mother Eva, and not part of the herd...but as far as I could tell, there was practically no substance behind their sense of their own specialness (or their utter contempt for the masses), which was rather based on nothing more than their choice to be their own little herd of three. This illustrates the problem with this sort of Nietzschean pseudo-egoism very well: the alternative to populism is not elitism, but individualism...and elitism is by definition not individualism. As one dictionary aptly puts it, elitism is "consciousness of or pride in belonging to a select or favored group"...it may be a smaller group, but it is still defining oneself primarily in terms of and in relation to the group.

Then there's all that stuff about Emil's crush on his best friend's mother, which came off not so much as liberating as just plain awkward. Throw in some all-too-obvious Jungian symbolism and bad Nietzschean philosophy (Nietzsche is explicitly mentioned more than once), and what started out as an interesting coming of age story degenerates into an overblown and in some respects absolutely ludicrous exercise in pomposity.

Still, I enjoyed this more than Siddhartha...but not as much as Narcissus and Goldmund, which felt both more honest and more relevant to me. But there are some nice passages here, and the beginning was pretty good, and it was certainly instructive to see what Beyond Good and Evil would look like put into practice (not very impressive)...so it might be worth reading once if you're interested in this sort of thing. ( )

Hesse reminds us in Demian that spiritual growth or self-realisation is not about what we gain, but what we lose. It is the discovery of what we already have by discarding what obscures 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 life, I'd been Sinclair, with his fears, his disappointments, his feeling of not belonging. When I was fourteen I had the biggest crisis of my life, the one that make you grows one way or another. I felt lonely, even if i was always surrounded by my friends and family; I felt wrong, because I didn't fit anymore with my previous life. Things that used to be enough for me, wasn't anymore. New fears were born and old certainties died. This crisis didn't last long, maybe a year, but it left something inside me, a restlessness, a longing. For years I was in search for something that would make sense, for a reality in which I could stand and that I could understand, for a religion that I could believe in without ifs. The change came when I met my current partner, at seventeen. We were both young and we both shared curiosity and need of knowledge. He was, someway, my Demian. He made me think differently, loosing the old path for many new ones. We have ranged among many cultures, ways of think, religions, learning what we could for realize in the end that all we had to do was live our lives without comply with what we didn't believe at all costs, following our dreams and our ideals. That is what this book has been and done for me today. It helped me to reconnect with my old self and see the past for what it was, what looked like a search for meaning was in reality a search for myself. ( )