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The Forrest Dweller

by Hermann Hesse

This week we are reading 'The Forrest dweller' by Hermann Hesse. The Forest Dweller, by Hermann Hesse, is a tale not only of the downfall of tyranny or the fall of the high priest it is a tale of existential enlightenment. Kubu struggles to break free from the tribe that exiles him and the forest that holds him prisoner. Hesse explores a range of complex ideas within this story, focusing on existentialism, the individual vs the herd, faith and spirituality, trust, and the role that fear plays in our lives. The Central character of Kubu is set against his tribe by the local leader and shaman 'Mata Dalam', and soon finds himself looking for answers outside of all that he has previously been taught of the world. 

The Forrest dweller was published in 1917 and features in several collected short stories volumes, notably 'The fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse' 1995 and  more recently 'The Sorcerers Apprentice' 2017. 

Read the book online: The Forrest Dweller

For more here is an essay on the Short Story: The Forrest Dweller

About the Author

Born in Calw a small town in Swabia, on July 2, 1877, Hesse was raised in a religious household. His Father, Johannes who had been a pietistic missionary in India, continued to work in the ministry when he returned to Germany. His mother, Marie, was an assistant to her own father, Herman Gundert, director of the Calw publishing house, one of the leading pietistic book companies in Europe.

Herman Hesse’s fairy tales are not really fairy tales in the traditional sense of the term, and yet they are deeply embedded in both the western and the oriental traditions of fairy tales written between 1900 and 1933, Hesse’s unusual narratives record his endeavours to experiment with the fairy-tale genre and to make his own life as an artist into fairy-tale. He failed as far as his life was concerned because he could never achieve the ideal state he desired but his tales were successful exactly because of this failure: they are filled with the inner turmoil of a writer desperately and seriously playing with aspects of a literary genre to find some semblance of peace and perfect harmony. To know Hermann Hesse’s fairy tales is to know all the trauma, doubts, and dreams of the artist as a young man in Germany in the beginning of a tumultuous century. Like many other European writers Hesse perceived the events surrounding - the rapid advance of technology, the rise of materialism, the world wars, the revolutions and the economic inflations and depressions - as indicative of the decline of Western civilisation. It was through art, especially the fairy-tale, that Hesse sought to content with what he perceived to be the sinister threat of science and commercialism.

Join us on Thursday at 3PM to chat about the book!

What is the book club?

Join us every week for a book club, each week we will read a new short story of part of a larger book, the books will be made available as an audio book and we will meet as a group via zoom to chat about the story. All are welcome, hope to see you there. 

How to join the club to chat

The zoom link to join will apear above on this page at 3PM on Thursday. To join you will need a phone/tablet or laptop with a built in camera and microphone (most modern devices come with this) you may need to download the zoom app onto your phone if you are using a phone to join.

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