the book is much better than the review

I am rereading Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse, which I last read when I took a class on Hesse in college. My good friend Jeremy had taken the class the previous semester and recommended it. I think Jeremy was the one to dub it 'Hermann Hesse's Home For Happy Hippies,' which is what it was every semester. Thirty longhairs looking to bridge that West-East Gap. I was particularly stressed during that semester's mid-terms. I really was a terrible student. In one class, History of the Middle East, I had decided to attend only the first lecture, the mid-term and the final exam...which was something I did for quite a few classes. The night before the mid-term, I was looking over the handouts from the first day and one of them gave the structure of the mid-term exam. It seemed that one section involved knowing the definitions of fifteen key terms that had been handed out sometime at a later lecture. I went straight to the library and walked all around each of the eight floors searching for someone with one of our History of the Middle East textbooks. After going up to the eighth floor, back down to the first and back up again, I found someone on the fourth floor. I am not sure what I said to this poor girl, but I ended up with a copy of the key terms handout complete with her definitions. I attended the beginning of every subsequent lecture to see what the handouts were, and then walked out. Finally, the professor gave out the fifteen key terms for the final exam, and I never attended another lecture. The night before the final, I discovered that there were actually thirty key terms needed for the exam. They had been broken down into two handouts. So, back to the library I went... Perhaps it was that very semester when I was particularly stressed during mid-terms. Jeremy noticed and told me, referencing the Ferryman in Hesse's Steppenwolf, to 'listen to the river.' I promptly, and honestly, told him to fuck the river, which is about as Western a response as possible and it made me laugh then and it makes me laugh now. Another good friend, Geoff, was in the Home for Happy Hippies along with me. He read nothing. Maybe he read Steppenwolf. Geoff kept all his important documents and papers in a shoe box. Jeremy once asked him if he had that shoebox in one hand and shoebox full of pot in the other and he had to toss one of them which would it be? Jeremy and I both had a deep reverence for shoeboxes full of pot, but we both also understood the extreme hassle of replacing important documents and papers and knew this had to be carefully weighed. But Geoff didn't have to weigh anything. He was holding his shoebox when the question was posed and he just tossed it over his shoulder as if the other would magically appear. Once I heard him let out a girlish scream when a dog named Clifford stole his sandwich. At the Hesse final, Geoff brought every Hesse book that Jeremy owned...about twenty of them. Half weren't books we read for the class and it wasn't an open-book exam, so there wasn't any reason to bring even one book which would have been one more than the rest of us brought. He was just sitting there at his desk waiting for the professor to come with the exam surrounded by a fortress of Hesse books as if the presence of obscure works like Knulp would intimidate the rest of the class into doing worse than he was about to do. I remember enjoying Narcissus and Goldmund back then. It is a little disturbing to me how I recollect basically none of it. But then I think about what I do recollect from that time and I feel much better.

"Hesse lifts the contrapuntal play of conflicting forces into a plane as close to music as words will come. What lingers in the reader's mind is a melancholy melody, a romatic "lied" full of wanderlust for a trip into the id." --Saturday Review