Review: Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

by Chriss Cornish published: May 19, 2010 No Comments

This Book Is About

In the shade of a banyan tree, a grizzled ferryman sits listening to the river. Some say he’s a sage. He was once a wandering shramana &, briefly, like thousands of others, he followed Gotama the Buddha, enraptured by his sermons. But this man, Siddhartha, was not a follower of any but his own soul.

Born son of a Brahmin, Siddhartha was blessed in appearance, intelligence & charisma. In order to find meaning in life, he discarded his promising future for the life of a wandering ascetic. Still, true happiness evaded him. Then a life of pleasure & titillation merely eroded away his spiritual gains until he was just like all the other “child people,” dragged around by his desires.

My Thoughts On This Book

I originally read Siddhartha in highschool for one of my English classes and really enjoyed it.

Siddhartha is set around 400 BC/BCE, in the time of the Buddha, in the Nepal region of the Indian subcontinent. This historically set novel was originally published in German, in 1922, and the first English translation is still in publication.

Though a quick read, it’s a rich one as well, with the main character’s life, which represents the spiritual journey of the soul, distilled down into just twelve chapters. There are several themes in the book, and the chapters and halves of the thin volume are representative of the stages of a Hindu male’s life and various Buddhist paths, all of which you can read about in detail to your heart’s content on the book’s Wikipedia page.

I’ve never thought much of book descriptions and reviews that go all gooshy and burble about a book being ‘lyrical’ and ‘powerful’. And I’m certainly not going to write one of those myself. But, if I was ever tempted to go on in that vein by a book than that book would be Siddhartha. Hess’ prose is simple, his descriptive style modern, and the spiritual journey of his main character is actually interesting to ‘watch’.

Just to dispel any possible confusion, the Siddhartha the novel follows is not the historical Siddhartha who became the Gautama Buddha, though the main character does become one of the Buddha’s followers in one phase of the novel’s twelve chapters.