Laura (Vera Caspary)

“In my case, self-absorption is completely justified. I have never discovered any other subject quite so worthy of my attention.”



Laura was written by Vera Caspary, who was also my Dad’s Grandfather’s wife. The story is less well known as a book, and more as a film by Otto Preminger, which was one of the first ever film noir. Actually, perhaps it isn’t well known at all these days, which is why I did a double take when I saw it stocked in Foyles in central London. Within minutes I was at the till, and I had finished reading it within hours and metres from that moment.

I don’t want to give too much of the plot away because it’s a first rate twister, but here’s a little flavour. A glamorous girl is found dead in her apartment, and it sure looks like murder. Mark, a hardboiled cliche of a detective, is called to the scene. He gives it a cynical once over. There ain’t much promising there, and he doubts the leads will amount to a hill of beans. The dead dame’s friend starts sniffing round the place too. He’s a fat thespish author who makes a living writing books about God knows what. Mark takes him to dinner to pump him for information, but doesn’t like the glint in his eye. The things he’ll do for for this damned job, he thinks but for some reason can’t get his mind off the dead girl. She sure was pretty. Sophisticated too from the look of her apartment. Mike begins to feel a strange connection with this once-elegant broad. He shakes his head vigorously, weird stuff like this just doesn’t happen to him. ‘Keep you eyes on the job Mike’ he tells himself. But then things take a turn for the down-right mysterious – and fast – when a girl knocks on the door of the apartment. It’s the last person Mike ever expected to see, and suddenly the case blows wide open. Mike looks at his watch with a sigh, ‘this’ll take some time’, he thinks dolefully ‘and just when the overtime sheet’s been suspended too.’

Hidden Wisdom

Is there any hidden wisdom in there? Not really. Some books are written to be thought about. Or to be written about. Others want to teach you about life, or else make some dull and obvious philosophical point. But some books are completely and unashamedly written to be read. Laura is one of those kind of books, and it’s glorious. I lost four hours to it. The time just went. I was sitting on a bench on the South Bank looking at little pleasure boats and the sunlight gleaming off the Thames. I opened Laura, and four hours later, I looked up. The book was finished, and I was bathed in a milky twilight. The time vanished as comprehensively as if I had been watching a film, or dreaming. I opened the book, got in, had a roller coaster of a ride, got off and took the tube home. And that’s exactly the kind of engagement the book wants: Laura is a good time girl.

Vertigo

Laura struck me as very similar to Hitchcock’s Vertigo - in both there is a similar theme of lust and obsession, and a detective-type character falls for a girl who he thought was dead. The intended victim and the murderer are very similar in both stories. The plots are different, but the structure of both films is nearly the same. They could almost double up for each other in an elaborate murder plot...

The Last Word

Since it was written by a relative, I felt almost a connection with Laura’s eponymous heroine from the beyond the page. It was like she was reaching out to me, and I couldn’t help thinking that Laura was not some dead-press character, but a real living person. Later I discovered that it was only her look-alike that was fictional, and that, in a staggering twist of metafiction, the real Laura was alive and living in Islington, safe from the ravaging occupational dangers of life in a detective story. Safe, but for how long?

Jane Eyre

"What’s your name?"

"Eyre.

Jane Eyre"

And with that, I expected Ms. Eyre to tuck her beretta back inside her gown, before ordering a martini with very specific serving instructions. Because with a bit of training, I think Jane Eyre would make a good 007. She’s clearly got the courage for it, but I’m unclear whether she would find the idea of being a superspy morally repugnant. Of course, scared as I’m to receive even imagined vituperations from Jane Eyre’s eponymous heroine, I’ll refrain from any more action-hero comparisons, for now...

Not having read Jane Eyre felt like a big hole in my life. The kind of all-consuming black hole that leads one to break down weeping in the supermarket before panic buying shredded wheat. I’ve previously read two pieces of fan fiction – the Wide Sargasso Sea (eurgh), and the Eyre Affair (awesome fun) – so I was long overdue to snuggle down on the sofa with Jane Eyre, a bottle of scotch, and some evening primrose oil to calm me down if it all got too much.

Jane Eyre tells the tale of a plain girl, brought up short on love, but long on pluck. After being sent to a tough school - somewhere between Twist and Copperfield in severity -  she goes to work as a Governess in a large, and largely abandoned home. One day, the master returns; a severe, crotchety, particular gentleman named Mr. Rochester. He is quickly drawn to Jane, and singles her out as someone he is comfortable talking to. A hop, skip and a tumble later sees Jane and Rochester in love, and, what is more, betrothed to be married. Of course, circumstance gifts them testing times, and the path of their loves runs not smooth. So, can these luck-crossed lovers make it across the desert of despair? Will they endure the outrageous fortunes that hope slings them? The answer is, emphatically, YES, and as Jane so winningly tells us, ‘Reader, I married him’.

Wonderfulness baked in

Buried in this book is a great big dollop of optimism. It’s been alleged that in double blind trials, Jane Eyre fairs somewhere between lithium and barbiturates at helping to cure depression. Unfortunately, no one bothered to try and get legal clearance since, now out of copyright, there’s just no money to be made in its marketisation. Damn you drug companies, you profit seeking fiends!

Anyway, although Jane Eyre has an almost savage facade, much like its main character, the book is 100% heart. Jane isn’t just a woman, she is also a plain, slight Governess, and back then, all of those attributes were seen to diminish her value. Obviously they don’t, and Jane knows it; commanding equality and respect wherever she finds herself. I worried for a while that Rochester seemed to see Jane a bit like a pet or plaything, something to be bossed around. He married ‘below his station’, seemingly purposefully, because he prefered his wife to have ‘pliability’.  But in the end, Jane thoroughly owns him - taking care of him, baiting him and in nearly all senses ‘wearing the trousers’.  

For me, Jane Eyre was like finding an old World War 1 unexploded bomb under my house. I felt I was looking at something that was once explosive but no longer. I imagine that when it was written, the straight-talking, equality-claiming Jane Eyre was a molotov-cocktail into an age of stuffy, cigar-filled gentleman’s clubs. But these days, it’s a bit toothless. I mean, the idea of Governess marrying a richer man isn’t exactly fall-off-your-chair shocking. So I appreciated the novel’s once-revolutionary nature, and thoroughly enjoyed the story, but I think this fighting book has been transformed by time into a simple society romance. And that’s good and bad. Bad, because the book is less impactful than once it was, but good because society has moulded round it and overall become a much more equal and much fairer place.

Tristram Shandy

For some reason, I didn’t get on with this book. But, unlike with other novels that I’ve read this year, I don’t have any desire to criticise it. Sometimes books annoy me or I think I can see flaws in them, but I didn’t see many flaws in Tristram Shandy. In a way, I wondered whether it was just a bit cleverer than me. Perhaps Tristram Shandy is like the cool kid on the playground and had better things to do than explain why it was so awesome to a loser like me. But whatever the reason, we just weren’t friends.

How I read

I think partly, it comes down to how I read books. My mind tends to focus in on what it thinks is ‘important’. I’ll follow one narrative thread, and make sure I know what’s going on. That means that books with a split narrative can be frustrating to me because my mind wants to zoom in on one set of events.

I also often think about other things whilst I’m reading. My mind will briefly flutter to work, the news or economics (weird, right?). I think it’s a bad habit and I’m trying to improve my focus, but right now it’s the way I read. The question I subconsciously ask when my mind crashes back into the book world is, ‘did I miss anything important?’ If the story is where I expect, I read on. If not, I’ll skim backwards to find out what I missed.

All of this completely conflicts with reading Tristram Shandy. Because it isn’t a split narrative, it’s an exploded one. So I found I would read down the page, think about something else for a second, come back, and ask the question ‘did I miss anything important?’, and the answer would invariably be ‘I don’t know what the hell is going on’. The narrative was always in an utterly different place.

And it conflicted in another sense too. The whole of Tristram Shandy is one big joke. There are scores of pages on how the narrator's father believes bigger noses are a sign of higher intelligence. This goes on and on and on, culminating in a thirty page ‘extract’ from a fictional philosopher telling a story that illustrates this point. So when my mind asked ‘did I miss anything important’, the question always seemed a bit irrelevant - nothing in Tristram Shandy is ‘important’ at all...

Going deeper

I read for lots of reasons, but the main one is to learn things about life, to become wise, to gain knowledge of what makes us human. I think Tristram Shandy offers a more... aesthetic experience.  It’s designed to be funny, humorous, and clever. It’s a book to be enjoyed in the moment, rather than giving you anything you can really take away. It’s not deep, it’s not emotional, instead it’s clever, humorous, a hoot.

And I have to confess, I found it quite hard work. I felt like I was expending a lot of energy in forcing my mind to plough through hundreds of pages of light jokes that I didn’t find funny. There was also a lot in there that I just didn’t understand, and I think I missed a lot of the cleverness. There were many references, for example, to things that I had never heard of. Overall, this has been the book that I’ve least enjoyed this year. I hated Wide Sargasso Sea, but it was more of a problem with what it stood for than any lack of reading enjoyment. Tristram Shandy, on the other hand, was a real struggle for me.

The End

Tristram Shandy has been described by the Guardian as the seventh best novel of all time, and was originally thought of as ‘too popular’ to really be a literary success. I loved the concept. It’s a raucous send-up of the idea of a novel,  a seminal textbook of metafiction, and imbued with a riotous disregard for form. Frankly though, a lot of the time I felt lost and confused. I blame myself entirely, and I’ll file this under ‘one to read again’.

Frankenstein!

Frankenstein is my second Gothic Horror this year - and I absolutely loved it! Mary Shelley was only 18 when she wrote this novel, but she had astonishing skill and wisdom for one so young.

Dr. Victor Frankenstein spends his nights in the laboratory putting together human parts in a bid to create life. One night, he succeeds and sees a set of ghoulishly-pale eyes open from the newly-formed being lying on his table. The creature escapes, and Dr. Frankenstein is horror-struck at the crime against nature he has surely committed. This feeling increases when he finds his brother has been brutally murdered. In his heart, he fears that the perpetrator is the monster he so foolishly brought into life. Eventually, this being confronts him, and tells Frankenstein that he has spent his short, miserable existence yearning – like all of us – to be loved. Victor filled with dread, denies the creature the friendship he so craves, and the monster, in a fit of hell-bent fury, promises to to wreak a terrible revenge – to smite and destroy everything that Dr. Frankenstein holds dear.

Frankenstein is very different from the popular idea of the halloween monster, daubed in yellow with a bolt sticking out of his neck. The monster is different – and more human – than his namesake today, but the most surprising element of the novel to me was a long section that was strongly reminiscent of Arabian Nights...

On responsibility

Frankenstein has a lot of wisdom in it, for example on morality. Frankenstein’s monster essentially feels that he would be nice if someone showed him love. He then goes on to murder a series of people when he finds that love and compassion is not forthcoming. Of course, this isn’t exactly a good temperament. I think most people would judge that you cannot be described as a good person, if your good actions are conditional on receiving some benefit for yourself. However, the question it raises is, is it possible to do good in the world – to be a good person – if you never receive anything but hatred and disgust in return? If, like Frankenstein’s monster, nothing you can do will stop people hating and fearing you, then your incentive to do good, is practically zero.

Looking at this another way, would we want to say that there should be nothing that can drive you to commit as deeply an immoral act as murder? Even if you have been given no incentive to act well, and, like the monster been given no moral education? Consider this, everything in the monster’s genetic makeup was given to him by his creator, Dr. Frankenstein. And the Dr. gave the creature no moral education, leaving his temperament to be sculpted by the ravages of a wild and feral environment. So who is to blame for the monster’s murders?

It’s tricky to answer that question. If you say the monster, then I think that’s the same as saying people with serious mental illnesses should be held fully responsible for any crimes they commit. If you say Dr. Frankenstein, then you’re also saying that the parents of serial killers should sometimes be incarcerated rather than the killer themselves.

I think the answer to this question is that these two people – Dr. Frankenstein, and his monster – are simply at different points of the causal chain which led to the monster’s crimes. In general, causal chains for any action, but crimes especially, are very long and complicated, and ‘responsibility’ is always just an arbitrary line we chose to draw somewhere on that chain. We always want to be able to point the finger at someone. It’s comforting to have someone to blame, but in reality the causes that lead to any action are both unknowable and unquantifiable. I think the implications of that are astounding. If we can’t identifying who is ‘truly responsible’, then there can be no role for punishment in society. By this I mean we should aim to rehabilitate offenders, and confine people who pose an immediate danger, but not punish them.  Put simply, how could we even begin to determine who to punish if the idea of responsibility is grey and murky?

On appearance

The thing I found most striking about Frankenstein is that the monster was shunned by humankind largely because of its appearance. True, it turned out to have a rather evil temperament, but the reader is lead to believe that this could have been avoided if the monster was treated with some humanity. The truth is that appearance still has a stranglehold on our society:  it is still completely acceptable to judge people’s value by the way they look. We all do it all the time, but it seeps into the background of our lives and we scarcely notice it.

The last word

Mary Shelley, somehow, came up with an idea for a horror-story that is so strong it almost guaranteed a fantastic book. The implications of someone creating intelligent (yet hideous) life are just incredibly interesting, and from many different angles - moral, psychological, legal etc. Just like Frankenstein’s monster, I think Shelley’s idea developed a life of it’s own, flying out of her head and demanding to be turned into a book. Because whilst the horror story is fun, the idea, the concept, of Frankenstein probes and prods the human condition in completely new and unusual ways. There is a lot of wisdom in there.

Heroes and Villains (Angela Carter)

This for me was a holiday read, and perhaps I didn’t read Angela Carter’s very best work. I’ll say right at the outset, I’m a bit mystified as to what she was trying to do.

In a dystopian future, a young girl called Marianne is brought up in a village shut off from the world. Dissatisfied with the clinical and routine-driven nature of her life, she runs away with a barbarian who lives in the wild outlands. Half-prisoner, she stays captive in his village, where she experiences a kind of sexual awakening with her barbarian king. Eventually she becomes his bride. They live a disgusting life, surrounding by filth, savages and garbage. But Marianne finds that although, in a rebellious bid for freedom, she has broken away from her rigid upbringing, the constructs inside her mind keep them both more imprisoned than any fence ever could.

Reading the plot summary on the back of the book, I thought the book would be some kind of erotic adventure story. I think the synopsis oversells – or at least mis-sells – the novel. There isn’t really any plot. A girl runs away from home, a few random things happen – there’s some sex, some fighting, some cryptic dialogue – and that’s it.  There’s no narrative structure, or resolution, and the action all takes place in the language of smoke-filled symbolism. So this isn’t one of those plot books, this is one of those say-something-about-the-world books. And that’s fine. The trouble is, I call bullshit...

Bullshit

Richard Boston writing for the New York Times called Heroes and Villains ‘a fable that discusses the roles of reason and imagination in a civilized society.’ The novel definitely does do that, but what’s important isn’t ‘discussion’, it’s what a novel actually has to say, you know, about real life. My feeling about fiction in general is that too many novels use cryptic and symbolic language to make points that are either simple, obvious or even untrue. Further, that unclear or imprecise writing is actually a technique that is used quite cynically to mask meaning that, if it was spelled-out clearly, no one would be interested in or would be obviously wrong. It’s a shame because the best writers use symbolism not to mask their meaning, but to shed light on difficult subjects, or create complicated, intellectually satisfying mosaics of multiple meanings - Moby Dick, or Ulysses spring to mind as almost symphonic in this regard.

I think I’ve got a good bullshit detector, and – I’m sorry – but I picked up a lot of it in Heroes and Villains. Check out this quote:

“What do you see when you see me?' She asked him, burying her own face in his bosom.

'Do you want the truth?'

She nodded.

'The firing squad.'

'That's not the whole truth. Try again.'

'Insatiability,' he said with some bitterness.

'That's oblique but altogether too simple. Once more,' she insisted. 'One more time.'

He was silent for several minutes.

'The map of a country in which I only exist by virtue of the extravagance of my metaphors.'

'Now you're being too sophisticated. And, besides, what metaphors do we have in common?”

I think that’s completely meaningless. I can acknowledge that the writer might have some ideas about her characters that would make that passage make sense. I can ever construct some in my head. Here’s my try: Why does he see the firing squad? Perhaps because her culture is doomed. And insatiable? As it happens, Marianne isn’t particularly insatiable, but it could mean that her culture is. And 'The map of a country in which I only exist by virtue of the extravagance of my metaphors.' Eek. I don’t understand that at all. Perhaps it’s not about the meaning, but about how the words make you feel...

There are several possible half-meanings in that paragraph, but it’s just not clear enough to understand precisely. And any meaning I can extract from it doesn’t really add much value to my life. For example, our civilisation is insatiable and over-reaching itself, and we need to create the idea of savages to in some way define us (I actually don’t think either of those things are true).

The Last Word

So my view is that Heroes and Villains fails. Just like a pun is only funny if it has two distinct levels of meaning, I think symbolism in a book is only clever if the surface level – the plot, the characters etc – makes sense and is engaging. And secondly, hidden meaning is only worthwhile if the meaning you have to work hard to find is profound, or, at the very least, interesting. To me, Heroes and Villains is a masterwork of style over substance - of nice-sounding sentences over ideas, character and plot. I’ll close with this quote. I like how it sounds a lot - but I also think it illustrates well this books deeply vacuous heart:

“Darkness was made explicit in the altered contours of his face. He was like a work of art, as if created, not begotten, a fantastic dandy of the void whose true nature had been entirely subsumed to the alien and terrible beauty of a rhetorical gesture.”

The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco)

Umberto Eco clearly wanted to write a book about 13th century theology. Luckily that’s not what he wrote, or not just what he wrote. I imagine the conversation with his publisher went something like this:

Eco:               I’ve got a great new book concept! The idea is that the hero – instead of being a person – is, instead, medieval papal theology!!

Publisher:       Who in God’s name is going to read that?’.

Eco:               [looks at his feet, taken a back. Suddenly, an idea flashes into his head.]: Well, there’s murders in it too. A few monks get killed off in an abbey, and then another monk basically Sherlock Holmes – investigates.

Publisher        [gives a slow approving nod] Oh yeah, that could work.

And you know what, a phrase swims into my mind after reading it: unbelievable tekkers. Because The Name of the Rose manages to pull off two pretty ace tricks that are rarely found in one book-shaped package  – it’s great fun, and it’s rather interesting too.

A few of my friends told me that they didn’t manage to ‘slog’ their way through this book; they intimated that it was dull and literary in a bad kind of way. This doesn’t resonate with me. I found it nothing but unadulterated fun. That said, there are long sections which involve only monks quibbling about arcane theological points. I found those sections fascinating, and Eco – like the best writers – is able to make you interested in something that bored you beforehand. But sometimes these papal asides happen at quite pacey moments in the plot, and I must admit even I had a few moments of ‘Cooomme Onn, just get back to the plot’. But it’s important to remember at these junctures that theology is the real hero, and the plot a mere exciting distraction. 

The Name of the Rose is well-written and slick, but that doesn’t detract from the books most important and wonderful characteristic: the whole thing is great big dollop of silly. Somehow though, the author manages to convince the reader that it’s a serious work. And it is, in one sense. But it’s also pure silliness, and pure fun. There are mysteries and sleuthing, and shenanigans and secret night-time missions. The book has everything you would expect from a Sherlock Holmes story story set in a monastery, but somehow Mr. Eco imbues it all with a deep gravitas. It’s almost akin to the magician who pronounces to the audience solemnly ‘Ladies and Gentleman, this trick involves real danger, please stay silent at all times’. And the novel’s denouement – don’t worry, I won’t spoil it – is the silliest of the lot, it had me laughing out loud.

Bullshit

Of course, books always get me thinking about life too. I read this book mostly in the wilds of rural Canada – snow-capped mountains to the left of me, and a giant blue lake to the right. What struck me most – in that carefree place – was that in the 13th century people burnt each other at the stake over spurious theological questions. For example, was Christ poor? The bible doesn’t describe him as owning any possessions, and, since Christians seek to emulate Christ, perhaps the church itself shouldn’t own any possessions. Only one problem – the Catholic Church at the time was incredibly rich and powerful, so accepting the doctrine of Christ’s poverty would entail abandoning it’s eminent position.

So – just like Carrie Bradshaw –  that got me to thinking. The history of humans, more or less, is intertwined with the history of bullshit. Ever since we evolved from being a mere squelch of symbiotic slime stagnating on a rock-face, people have been believing in utterly ridiculous things. And partly that’s great, because life is ridiculous and a lot of ‘out-there’ beliefs have changed the world. But there’s also been a lot of genuinely ludicrous beliefs too.  Like burning witches, feeding people mercury to cure them, or ten foot lizards. Two hundred years ago people even thought leeches could cure diseases (oh wait...). We all have the propensity to believe in absolutely ridiculous ideas.

But, what’s interesting to me is that this, humans always seem to behave like humans. Whatever wacky beliefs people have, it doesn’t really affect how they behave at all! The reason the Catholic church burnt heretics was simply because they were protecting their power. The theological differences were merely the surface level excuse. And I think that’s often true. All over the world people believe radically different, contradictory things, but mostly they still act with the same motivations as everyone body else.. Some people are nice, some are nasty, but however lofty their beliefs, their motivations are often all too human.

The last word

On reading The Name of the Rose, be prepared. The book will reach into your mind and thoroughly hook you into the plot. It will then drag you through pages and pages of ancient theology. What I’m trying to say is that I came for the medieval detective, murder-solving monk, but I left with the papal politics and the fractious bickering of defunct Christian sects. And for that I have to say, Umberto Eco, well played sir.

Some other interesting reviews

Irrelevant Scribble
meetmetitanium
Eye on Everything
Splendid Labyrinths
Distracting from the Now

The Prodigy (Hermann Hesse)

I love Hermann Hesse. He’s written some amazing books. The Glass Bead Game, Sidhartha and Steppenwolf are all among my favourites. So it was with joy and anticipation that I picked up The Prodigy (also called Beneath the Wheel).

The Prodigy is one of Hesse’s early efforts, and it’s a bit different. I think as a finished novel, it’s actually quite weak, but it is an interesting read because you can see the seeds of Hesse’s mental development, and in the second half particularly some of the writing is quite wonderful. Hermann Hesse is famous for crisp writing; his novels are almost fabalistic in their abstraction from every day life. His writing is alway simple, alway concise, and the novel-world tends to be a minimal, essential construction of reality. The Prodigy, well... it isn’t like that. The world is recognisably just the past. And although it never really approaches ‘grittiness’, it puts a dulling filter on life – things seem drab, dreary and imbued with a kind of stale, sepia-tone melancholy. The plot is very simple. A gifted boy called Hans works hard and gets into a demanding school. He struggles to keep pace with the academic and abstruse work he is given. Over time his spirit is broken by this string of zestless esoterica, and his once-eager mind starves on a diet that is so unconnected to the rawness and vitality of real life. It’s a powerful message; an ‘indictment of a conventional education’ according to the blurb on the back of the copy I read. Yet I couldn’t help but feel that Hesse created a caricature version of the real world, and exaggerates how beastly it all is. I agree that learning Latin and Greek in order to pour over the texts of Homer line by line sounds epically dull, especially on a hot summers day. Whilst real education isn’t anything like that today, perhaps it was back when Hesse was writing. But even so, is it so terrible? Sure, I think children could benefit more from learning other things, but Hans has specifically chosen to learn this kind of content. He felt pressured, but actually this is mild ‘pressure’ compared to the rest of the stuff ‘real’ life throws at you. All in all, Hesse’s critique feels a bit wet. Children should learn things that make them connected rather than disconnected with the natural world. However, wanting something and then not getting it, or wanting something then realising it’s the wrong thing, are pretty fundamental parts of life. On education The ending annoyed me too. Hans’ death was narratively inevitable as the only way to effectively represent how utterly the school system had failed him. I accept that the novel isn’t literally trying to say that people are at risk of death from a bad education – because in by far the majority of cases they’re not – but perhaps they are at risk of their spirit ‘dying’, or some other metaphorical expression of death. The annoying part is that Hesse completely fails to talk about what schools give their pupils. In general, I think learning is inherently good and enriching. Even if the kid Hans wasn’t cut out for a conventional education, he still learnt skills and knowledge which would have had a beneficial effect on the texture and quality of his experience for the rest of his life. It’s a sacrifice, and, yes, he probably wanted to be outside snogging girls and jumping through mud. But education is supposed to be an investment. You sacrifice a worse time now, in order to have a set of better quality experiences for the rest of your life. On love Hesse comes alive when he starts describing Hans falling in love. It’s lovely writing. The description of Hans’ heart opening is a beautiful thing. I felt my confidence slightly betrayed though. The kid goes to school and has – all told – a terrible time. When he comes into the real world, he immediately finds some of the pleasures that there exist, including the sweetness of first love. It doesn’t last, of course. But I really thought the book was intending to show how real life is a far better teacher than a school. The book would then have been twice as long, and ten times as good. Instead, the child loses his love, gets drunk and then quickly dies. “When a tree is polled, it will sprout new shoots nearer its roots. A soul that is ruined in the bud will frequently return to the springtime of its beginnings and its promise-filled childhood, as though it could discover new hopes there and retie the broken threads of life. The shoots grow rapidly and eagerly, but it is only a sham life that will never be a genuine tree.” Should you read this? Should you read this? I haven’t read everything else by Hesse, but I have read a fair bit. So I think I could take an odds-on gamble that this is below his average output in terms of quality. That being the case, you’re better off picking a random other Hesse and seeing what happens. I guess that seems like I’m answering ‘No’ to the question – and perhaps I am – but only because I’m concerned about best using your time, not because it isn’t a good read. I enjoyed it.