Siddhartha  (English, Paperback, Hesse Hermann)

A notable work of the Nobel Laureate Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha is an allegorical novel about the life of a young boy of the same name who takes the path to self-discovery during the times of the Buddha.

Summary Of The Book

Set in an Indian village, the novel takes off with the protagonist Siddhartha meeting the Samana monks and choosing to take a different path than his father. Born to a brahmin, Siddhartha, who is blessed with good looks, sharp intellect and charm, startles his family as he decides to renounce the material world and take on the road to salvation. He then, along with his friend Govinda, becomes homeless, fasts, gives up all his personal belongings and vehemently meditates in order to reach his goal.

Though his life takes a detour when he meets and falls in love with Kamala, it won't be long before his instincts win over the material pursuits. Disgusted by the greed and lust in people he sees around, like the Buddha, Siddhartha too returns to his quest of attaining enlightenment. What follows is a journey that involves sufferings, rejections, wisdom and peace.

Later, on a pilgrimage to visit the dying Buddha (who is referred to as Gotama in this book), Siddhartha happens to meet Kamala and his son, only to be put through the dark realities of life, attachment and death. The novel gets its perfect resolution when Siddhartha stumbles upon the answer that brings him back to the timeless truth about human existence.

Through out the book, Hesse very insightfully takes to metaphorical symbols when he writes about things like the sounds of the river Siddhartha crosses, the deeply content ferryman called Vasudeva, and so on. He captures the conflicts of the human mind that impede one from becoming who he really is. And, he unveils in front of his readers, a world of spiritual awe influenced greatly by Buddhist teachings and Indian philosophy.

Written shortly after Hesse's stay in India, Siddhartha was a result of his spiritual endeavors that included the study of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. It was written in German over a span of three years and was published in the year 1922. The first English translation of Siddhartha was done by Hilda Rosner in 1951.

About Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse was a celebrated German-Swiss painter, novelist and poet.

Peter Camenzind, Gertrud, The Glass Bead Game, Steppenwolf, and Knulp are some of his other works.

Hesse was born in the year 1877 in Calw into a Christian family. After quitting bookshop and mechanic apprenticeships in his youth, he started working for a bookshop in Tubingen in 1895, which is said to have influenced his writing the most. There, he was exposed to a huge collection of books on law, theology and philology. Though he had by then started writing poems, short stories and other pieces, it was in 1904 that his first novel Peter Camenzind earned him major popularity and fans including Sigmund Freud. He married Maria Bernoulli in 1904 and even served in the Imperial Army as a volunteer during the First World War. Owing to his long list of literary successes, he earned Swiss citizenship in 1923 and in 1946, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. He passed away in 1962, at the age of 85.