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Siddhartha: Herman Hesse
Oct. 17th, 2013 06:21 amSomeone mentioned Siddhartha on FFA and I remembered I hadn't reviewed it yet!
Siddhartha, a young man living in 5th century India, decides to leave his well-off existence to find spiritual fulfillment. He joins the Samanas, a group of wandering ascetics, dragging his friend Govinda with him. After several years with them, he hears Gautama (Sakyamuni) speak, and leaves the group, while Govinda joins Gautama. Siddhartha wanders into a city where he meets Kamala, a courtesan, and dabbles in the life of the mundane awhile. Years later, he becomes sick of this life and moves on, finally settling with a ferryman who lives and listens to the river. All this time, he is trying to find something--something he doesn't even know.
As the lackluster summary probably shows, I did not like this book. I had what I can only describe as a most unpleasant collision of philosophies with it. This normally wouldn't be such a problem, except I did not like Siddhartha at all either, and that bothered me a lot.
I make no pretensions to being a sophisticated reviewer here. This was one of the books that would have been on my high school reading list, so it's obviously interesting enough to merit its inclusion (this list was for International Baccalaureate's Higher Level English (i.e. for your primary language) if you're curious.) My English teacher chose to do other works that year, but mentioned that in other years he'd swap it in for other works, and so I've always been curious about it. Despite disliking many of the works we studied personally, I think many of them merited study or at least reading--I've never regretted reading them, nor spending time analyzing them. (Dejection: an Ode, though...) However, my annoyance with the text means that I mostly focus on that, not on a more specific topic that someone doing more formal analysis probably focuses on. I'm sure there are many good analyses out there, including ones by people actually familiar with Buddhism or various philosophies.
( Now that I've gotten that out of my way, the review )
To sum all that up: do I regret reading it? No. There are very few things I regret reading, and this includes truly brain-bleach worthy things on the internet. I didn't enjoy it very much, but I'm glad to know what it's about. And, well, I got to deconstruct it in a rather rambly entry. But I don't think I'm going to read much other Hesse, not soon. I would not recommend this book if you enjoy books partly because of protagonists, because he was very unlikable, nor if you disagree with the quasi-religious idea of everything being One. I don't even know how to rate this. 8/10?
Siddhartha, a young man living in 5th century India, decides to leave his well-off existence to find spiritual fulfillment. He joins the Samanas, a group of wandering ascetics, dragging his friend Govinda with him. After several years with them, he hears Gautama (Sakyamuni) speak, and leaves the group, while Govinda joins Gautama. Siddhartha wanders into a city where he meets Kamala, a courtesan, and dabbles in the life of the mundane awhile. Years later, he becomes sick of this life and moves on, finally settling with a ferryman who lives and listens to the river. All this time, he is trying to find something--something he doesn't even know.
As the lackluster summary probably shows, I did not like this book. I had what I can only describe as a most unpleasant collision of philosophies with it. This normally wouldn't be such a problem, except I did not like Siddhartha at all either, and that bothered me a lot.
I make no pretensions to being a sophisticated reviewer here. This was one of the books that would have been on my high school reading list, so it's obviously interesting enough to merit its inclusion (this list was for International Baccalaureate's Higher Level English (i.e. for your primary language) if you're curious.) My English teacher chose to do other works that year, but mentioned that in other years he'd swap it in for other works, and so I've always been curious about it. Despite disliking many of the works we studied personally, I think many of them merited study or at least reading--I've never regretted reading them, nor spending time analyzing them. (Dejection: an Ode, though...) However, my annoyance with the text means that I mostly focus on that, not on a more specific topic that someone doing more formal analysis probably focuses on. I'm sure there are many good analyses out there, including ones by people actually familiar with Buddhism or various philosophies.
( Now that I've gotten that out of my way, the review )
To sum all that up: do I regret reading it? No. There are very few things I regret reading, and this includes truly brain-bleach worthy things on the internet. I didn't enjoy it very much, but I'm glad to know what it's about. And, well, I got to deconstruct it in a rather rambly entry. But I don't think I'm going to read much other Hesse, not soon. I would not recommend this book if you enjoy books partly because of protagonists, because he was very unlikable, nor if you disagree with the quasi-religious idea of everything being One. I don't even know how to rate this. 8/10?
