An early autobiographical novel about what happens when a child is mistaken for a project.

Hans Giebenrath is the pride of his small German town: gifted, dutiful and pushed relentlessly toward academic distinction by his father, teachers and clergy. After winning entry to an elite seminary, however, the machinery built to cultivate his talent begins instead to grind it down.

The Prodigy is a compact and unsentimental attack on educational conformity, bourgeois ambition and the conversion of childhood into measurable achievement. Hans’s friendship with the rebellious Hermann Heilner opens another possible life — imagination, idleness, friendship, the body, the world outside institutional approval — but Hesse is interested precisely in how difficult it becomes to recover such possibilities once a person has learned to experience themselves primarily through other people’s expectations. Bleak, lucid and still irritatingly current.

Peter Owen, London, 2014. Peter Owen Modern Classic edition; first published in this edition in 2002. Translated from the German Unterm Rad. Paperback. Very light shelf wear and minor edge wear; clean and firmly bound. Near fine condition.