Generally liked the book, my first Hesse novel is probably 10 years. The structure was quite loose. Nevertheless, the conflicted mountaineering rural man finally finds his place in society. Hopefully, my own life will end as well. ( )

Peter Camenzind was Hermann Hesse’s debut novel. Like most firstlings, it describes the coming-of-age of a young man who feels called to be a writer.
I particularly enjoyed the first chapters, finely-observed descriptions, told in the first person, of Peter’s childhood and youth in the fictional village of Ninikon in the Berner Oberland. It’s an isolated village where almost all the households share the same family name.
Peter is complicated. He’s not a church-goer, yet he reveres Francis of Assisi and undertakes a pilgrimage to the saint’s Umbrian home. Loved ones who have died live in his imagination as angels. He feels an affinity to nature and aspires to bring it closer to others through his writing, yet he never gets very far with his project.
And those other people he wants to write for? He doesn’t like them very much and generally considers himself superior. He makes few friends. If they are male, they soon die; if female, they marry someone else. At one point, he looks back over his friendships and realizes they have been asymmetrical: he gets more from them than he gives. In the final two chapters, he compensates through his friendship with Boppi, a cripple.
For me, the novel peters out at the end (sorry). Peter takes such self-satisfied pleasure in his friendship with Boppi that it reeks of condescension. It, too, is an asymmetrical relationship, but in the other direction. Then, after Boppi dies, Peter forgoes a planned foot tour to return to Ninikon and look after the aging father with whom he never got along. He concludes that Ninikon is, after all, where he belongs. To me, it feels like a defeat. ( )

Peter Camenzind's life cycle in Switzerland matches what I have experienced myself in discussions with Swiss men on the Berner Oberland.

I reguarly see Hesse's description of daily life activities in the landscape. In a sense I can relish a century of landscape use on every walk. Landscape life history courtesy of Hermann Hesse. ( )

A young Hermann Hesse is still better than most writers of philosophical novels, but Peter Camenzind, written when its author was in his mid-twenties, is not a patch on later Hesse. It is not bad, by any means, only limited; it has a simple structure and is easy to follow, with some very lucid introspective writing that is one of Hesse's hallmarks at any age.

However, that simplicity comes largely because the book doesn't go very deep into its ideas. The protagonist's disillusionment with city society, and desire to return to the mountains and be one with nature, might well strike a chord, but the message is delivered professionally rather than with piercing clarity. The concluding idea – analogous to T. S. Eliot's later lines about how "the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time" – comes across, in Camenzind, as circular rather than revelatory. Plot and character development are spare (and not just by modern standards), and the book remains inessential among Hesse's works. ( )

An ode to wine, free wandering and reflection; St. Francis as a child of nature & discoverer of eternally human language. Reading this in tandem with Gunnar Dekkar’s biography of Hesse, which deep dives into the experiences in Hesse’s life paralleled in the novel. The novel has little structure, like a travelogue. This could have easily been something written by any young nomadic boy-man. There are hints of mythic depth tucked and folded within each chapter, but the attempts at an overarching story stops short with each vignette.

This is my second time reading the book, perhaps twenty years apart. I remember very little of the characters and the plot, but the feeling of lone wolf wanderings and wonderings lingers in memories of natural excursions. A family participant now, engraved in the social life, I take the waters of Peter Camenzind into my palms and recall such days of movement, reflections of singular living amongst the social realm, images of hills and trees over any particular face, the ease of cool nature caressing the skin as Thou seeps through to thine groundwaters. ( )