The Hermann Hesse Collection: Narcissus and Goldmund, Demian, Journey to the East (Peter Owen Special Editions)

Narcissus, a teacher at the medieval German monastery of Mariabronn, has Goldmund as his favourite pupil. While Narcissus remains detached from the world through prayer and meditation, Goldmund flees the monastery in pursuit of love. Thereafter, Goldmund leads a picaresque life as a wanderer, his amatory adventures resulting in both pain and ecstasy. Goldmund's eventual reunion with Narcissus highlights the diversity between artist and thinker, Dionysian and Apollonian.

Published shortly after the First World War, Demian is considered one of Hermann Hesse's finest novels. Emil Sinclair boasts of a theft he did not commit and finds himself blackmailed by a bully. He turns to Max Demian, who becomes his friend and spiritual mentor. This strangely self-possessed figure lures Emil out of his ordinary home-life and convinces him of an alternative world of corruption and evil. Emil's search for self-awareness, progressing from orthodox education to philosophical mysticism, culminates in a meeting with Demian's mother, a symbol and personification of motherhood.

It was Henry Miller who suggested to a publisher that he should acquire the rights to a translation of a novel by Hermann Hesse, who, despite having recently won the Nobel Prize, was little known outside Germany. The success of that first book, Siddhartha, ensured the publication of six further books by Hesse, including the one considered one of his best, Journey to the East, which first appeared in 1956. The narrator of this allegorical tale travels through time and space in a search for ultimate truth. This pilgrimage to the East covers both real and imagined lands, taking place not only in our own time but also in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The narrator's fellow travellers are both real and fictitious, including Plato, Pythagoras, Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, and Baudelaire.

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