The theme of fantasy runs strong in all Hesse's work; in this selection of 19 stories [Pictor's Metamorphoses and Other Fantasies], which span his entire writing career and embody many literary forms, he gives it its head. The title story, an allegorical account of a love affair of his own, is a charming but watercolory fable about the search for true happiness. "Lulu," the longest story and also the first written (1900), is a lushly romantic fairy tale, mingling fantasy and realism…. "Among the Massagetae" and "King Yu," written much later, skillfully turn fable to the uses of social satire. "The Jackdaw" (1951), one of the simplest but most effective pieces, is a rumination on an eccentric jackdaw, a solitary like Hesse himself (whose third wife nicknamed him "Bird"). For all their limpidity of style, ingenuity of fancy and attempts to portray the eternal verities of the human soul in the guise of magic, these stories do not have the power of a tale by the Brothers Grimm (who influenced Hesse greatly). Nor are they likely to disarm those critics who, not in the way of flattery, regard Hesse as the writer par excellence of adolescence.
"Fiction: 'Pictor's Metamorphoses and Other Fantasies'," in Publishers Weekly (reprinted from the November 20, 1981 issue of Publishers Weekly, published by R. R. Bowker Company, a Xerox company; copyright © 1981 by Xerox Corporation), Vol. 220, No. 21, November 20, 1981, p. 44.
