LoveReading Says
August 2010 Good Housekeeping selection.
On My Bookshelf by Joseph Fiennes...
I read Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse when I was 16 and it ignited my passion for literature – I’d been completely uninterested at school. It provides a simple breakdown of Buddhist philosophy as it follows a man who tries to find restoration on a higher plane.
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About Siddhartha
This book is an allegorical tale of a Brahman boy who seeks peace and enlightenment after leaving his well off circumstances. He sets his goal to self-denial and ascetic life among the numerous holy men than roamed the land in that time. After dissatisfied with ascetic life he seeks love and wealth in the city.
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Siddhartha Synopsis
This book is an allegorical tale of a Brahman boy who seeks peace and enlightenment after leaving his well off circumstances. He sets his goal to self-denial and ascetic life among the numerous holy men than roamed the land in that time. After dissatisfied with ascetic life he seeks love and wealth in the city.
His best friend becomes the follower of Gotama Buddha but Siddhartha is not satisfied to do the same. Finally he meets the ferrymen and learns to listen to the river. This and meeting and parting with his son are the heights of the book.
The river represents the eternal and timeless existence and oneness, and the meeting and parting with Siddhartha's son represents the attachments as obstacles to reach enlightenment.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9780982499450 |
| Publication date: |
16th February 2010 |
| Author: |
Hermann Hesse |
| Publisher: |
Ancient Wisdom Publications an imprint of Murine Publications LLC |
| Format: |
Hardback |
| Pagination: |
138 pages |
| Primary Genre |
Modern and Contemporary Fiction
|
| Recommendations: |
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About Hermann Hesse
Hermann Hesse was born in Claw, Germany in 1877. As a child he lived for a time in Basle. He spent a short period studying at a seminary in Germany but soon left to work as a bookseller in Switzerland. From 1904 he devoted himself to writing. After a first volume of verse (1899), Hesse established his reputation with a series of lyrical romantic novels - Peter Camenzind (1904), Unterm Rad (1906) Gertrud (1910) and the short story, Knulp (1915).
After a visit to India in 1911 he moved to Switzerland and worked for the Red Cross during the First World War. He was denounced in Germany and settled permanently in Switzerland, where he established himself as one of the greatest literary figures of the German-speaking world. His humanity, his searching philosophy developed further in such novels as Siddartha (1922), Der Steppenwolf (1927), Narziss und Goldmund (1930) and Das Glasperlenspeil (1943), while his poems and critical writings won him a leading place among contemporary thinkers. Hesse won many literary awards, including the Nobel Prize in 1946. He died in 1962, shortly after his eighty-fifth birthday.
Thomas Mann said of him 'For me his lifework, with its roots in native German romanticism, for all its occasional strange individualism, its now humorously petulant and now mystically yearning estrangement from the world and the times, belongs to the highest and purest spiritual aspirations and labours of our epoch.'
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