Siddhartha by Herman Hess

[Adopt]

I didn't see an actual thread devoted to it and it really does deserve it's own. If you've read Siddhartha, and if you haven't I strongly suggest you do, I'd like to know what you felt the most important messages or overtones were to you.

One of my favorites was his thinking about language, where he stated language was only transportation for ideas, or something along those lines.

[curlyqlink]

Honestly, I was disappointed in this one. Tales of spiritual journeys often seem a bit smug and self-satisfied, and this one also seemed frankly vapid to boot. Picked at random:

It is as I thought. The river spoke to you. It is your friend too; it speaks to you too. That is good; that is very good.

Perhaps this is too sublime for me; or perhaps it is simply the nonsense, childish nonsense, that I take it to be. The river, the rocks, the trees are all imbued with some invisible heavenly essence, they are alive like us. (The problem being, of course, they are not. Men are very unlike trees.) It all reminds me of children's stories, of Mister Frog and Mister Stone. Mister River wants to be your friend! Wishful thinking, not terribly interesting, and essentially sloppy thinking as well.

[blazeofglory]

I read it several times. I like the book for there the writer comes up lots of ques
tions. There is search, investigation and of course examination of truth. The writer had gone deeply and unveiling some facts respecting evolution in life. Here the characters have gone through stages of evolutions.

[Sarasvati21]

I kind of wanted to shoot myself when I read it. It was so boring I thought I would die from lack of brain activity. But after I finished it, I thought about it, and decided that I liked how Siddhartha's version of enlightenment was so contrary to everyone else's. His journey was also completely different, which I found appealing and easier to relate to.

[Nurse Catherine]

I don't see how Herman Hess won the Nobel Prize in literature and Mark Twain did not

The sentences in Siddhartha ran-on forever, on many occasions thoughts redirected in a sentence. The plot played second fiddle to points the author seemingly refused to summarize.

I felt like Charlie Brown listening to his teacher, "wah,wah, wah, wah, wah, wah".

The ending summarized the entire novel, a disappointment. I didn't blame Siddhartha's son, running away. Siddhartha came into his life on his mother's death bed critisizing the boy because he rejected the stinky ferryman life. The audience is left in the dark, whether Siddhartha finds his son. The end doesn't tie the loose plot strands after patiently wading through Hess' pious prattle to discover what becomes of Siddhartha's son. The bullheaded father, hopefully, accepted his 14 year old son might want money and girl friends. Who knows?


Swiss editors in the 1920's must have been liberal. The kind of pseudo intellectual during the time period reading the daily worker instead of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Four words summarize Siddhartha: insipid counter culture gibberish.