16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Reads Like a Painting, July 25, 2001
This review is from: Rosshalde (Paperback)
In Rosshalde, Hesse draws on his own life experience to describe the feelings of resigned loneliness surrounding the loveless marriage of painter Johann Veraguth and his wife, Adele. The famous painter lives alone in his studio on the same grounds as the house harboring his wife and son. This estate, Rosshalde, becomes the serene backdrop for the melancholy tale of a man whose love for his son has kept him in a stagnant state of resignation. A visit from an old friend finally stirs the emotions that have long been lurking inside of Veraguth, granting him the insight he will need to be free of his own self-made prison. Lyrical and deeply sad, Rosshalde is not Hesse's best work, but it may indeed be his most emotionally sincere.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Hesse's most honest, most intimate prose, July 19, 2003
This review is from: Rosshalde (Paperback)
In this short but unexpectedly brilliant novel, Hesse crafts a landscape of feelings, terrors, and dreams that reflects itself both in the artistic visions of the story's main character and in the dissembling beauty of the story's setting, the estate Rosshalde. Exposing layer after layer of secret thoughts and frustrations, this book is a rich tapestry of all the colors that belong to the palette of human experience.
The tale begins amidst a failing marriage, a blooming career, and a poisonous atmosphere of thoughts unspoken and wishes unfulfilled. Johann Veraguth and his wife Adele live just a short walk away from each other at the artist's splendid country estate, though their souls have drifted worlds apart. The only connection between them, a spoiled but charming child, Pierre, rather than bringing them together in a time of crisis, becomes a thorn in their side--the one love in both of their lives, and yet the most painful physical reminder of their lost marital happiness. Then a glimmer of light shines on Johann's miserable life: the promise of a new life, a death and rebirth. How the man learns to understand his selfishness and his error, how he comes to grasp the full meaning of his search for beauty and happiness, becomes the horrifyingly honest and candidly autobiographical plot of this book.
Though perhaps not as uplifting as _Siddhartha_ or as epiphanic as _Journey to the East_, this book far outshines Hesse's other works in its unflinching depiction of mental struggle, of discontent, depression, and self-criticism. The way Hesse explores each character's soul--especially in the uncanny synthesis of childish naivete and prophetically mature understanding in Pierre's nightmarish daydreams--is sublime. His final portrayal of hope for an end to self-annihilating unhappiness is not pessimistic, but real and heartfelt.
The pain and yearning in this book is real and heartfelt, and the ultimate hope it breathes equally so. Read it slowly, take in the landscape of Hesse's painting, and leave it with a resolve to live your life, to be you.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
My favorite Hesse novel, December 16, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Rosshalde (Paperback)
I've read most Hesse's work, and after long and hard deliberation(not really) I have found Rosshalde to just barely beat out The Steppenwolf. We know Hesse as being a very mystical writer, but this book is vibrantly real, and moving. If you want to understand Hesse as a person, and not as a writer, this is the book to read- it is similar to events that occured in his life. The question is then asked, should the artist(and this I mean writers, musicians, etc.) have a typical family? This is a question that will never be answered with a yes or no, but this book is accurate in exposing both sides of the battle.
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