At first sight this is an odd book for a German author, who as a young man had sufficiently strong callings to the priesthood that he briefly attended a seminary. But in 1911, in his mid 30’s, Hesse visited India and was introduced to Hindu mysticism and this has undoubtedly influenced this novel written in 1922. The story is set in ancient India, around 2500 years ago, it follows Siddhartha, and to a lesser extent his friend Govinda, in their quest for spiritual enlightenment. At first this leads them as young men to abandon their family homes and all their belongings and live in the forests as ascetic samanas, training their bodies to need nothing, using extended fasting and lack of clothes apart from a loincloth to preserve decency. This was a life of meditation and a severe deprivation of the body. A sample of the thoughts of Siddhartha are shown below and give a flavour of the sometimes difficult to follow text as Hesse can get caught up in the tautological expressions that he uses to try to explain Siddhartha thought processes for pages as a time.

Siddhartha and Govinda live with other samanas for a long time, occasionally begging for scraps of food as the bare minimum to stay alive but eventually they hear of a great teacher called Gautama (Buddha) and decide to travel to hear him teach. They eventually reach Gautama and hear him speak but whilst Govinda immediately resolves to follow the Buddha, Siddhartha instead explains that he feels that such enlightenment cannot be taught but must be individually gained through experiences and solitary meditation so the two friends part company. Leaving Govinda, Siddhartha travels until he reaches a river and there meets a ferryman who will become a significant character later in the book but for now he simply gets him to the other side whereupon he walks on to the next town. It is here that Hesse completely threw me as I thought I understood the path to enlightenment that Siddhartha was going to follow, but instead, on entering the town he sees a wealthy courtesan and is filled with desire. She however is not interested in the half starved gaunt and long haired ascetic standing in front of her and tells him that if he wants to know her better he has to be wealthy, clean and well dressed and he duly throws over his calling, gets his hair cut and body cleaned and perfumed, becomes a merchant and eventually earns a place in her bed. Definitely not what I had expected.

I admit I was somewhat daunted when beginning the book, not helped by Hesse’s undeserved reputation as a not very approachable writer, but as I read on I got more engrossed by the story and by the time of Siddhartha’s sudden change in direction I was highly intrigued as to where the novel was going and loved the ultimate resolution. It’s probably not a book for everyone, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. This is another of the Penguin Drop Caps series and eventually I will read all twenty six of these books, an explanation of the concept can be found on my my blog introducing the series here where I am also including links to each of the books as I review them.