Late prose

Fifteen smaller prose pieces are thematically and temporally linked to the late period of this Nobel Prize winner for literature. In them, he has honed his most fundamental lifelong themes into miniature verbal jewels. In Happiness, Hesse provides a brief but essential commentary on what is most important in his life and work: on a spiritual basis, both Christian and Oriental, he developed a resistance to the enchantment of so-called progress or "the sense of history" and discovered "the sense of cyclicity, whose axis is the eternal vertical". In The Interrupted Lesson, he confesses to feeling as if all attempts at meaningful narrative have slipped through his fingers, but it is at this threshold that modern literary creation begins. The beggar tells of a solitude full of images, of playing with them. The Stolen Suitcase is a story of which even Chekhov would not be ashamed, the theme is the human quest for possessions - what people are capable of clinging to. The peach tree is a parable of life and death, inscribed in the fate of a fruitful fruit tree.