Book Review: Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

* 1/3 *

Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

Confession.  I read this book because Star Child told me to.  But in my little rebellious way, I put it off for months and months.  After all, she is not my Queen, even though she knows that I am a slave. 

She was quite insistent that I read it.  At first, I had every intention of doing so.  I even scoured my house for the copy that I have had, inherited from an older sibling, and which I have had since I was about 16.  Maddeningly, I could not find it.  I am one of those people who likes to find things.

The response of this ADD person to the maddening chaos of misplaced keys, phones, anything I need right now, is to have order to the greatest extent possible.  Things have their place or they will never be found, and I can spend a day looking for one thing.  As is the way of ADD people, I will find something else whilst I am looking, and then be distracted by that thing, and then start something else, and my house will soon resemble a pile of unfinished projects.

After months of searching and rebelling against being told what to do by someone with whom I do not have a submissive relationship, I finally bought it.  After all, it was for my own good.  In particular, she felt the journey of Enlightenment described in the book is parallel to my own.  And given that she is the one leading me to Buddhism, there was that too.

Star Child is an avid reader, as am I.  We take walks and discuss books.  She is taken by the idea that my old Domme gave me a reading list with hundreds of titles and dictated what I read in part so that I could converse with her fluently on topics which interested her.  I asked for it.  And it was a joy to have that wish fulfilled.  Being relevant is important to this sub.

On one of our walks the other day, Star Child turned to me about something I was resisting doing and said, “but you’re a slave.”

“I’m not your slave,” I retorted.  

“I thought you were everyone’s slave.”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“I like that idea,” she said with a smirk, and then looked at me and said, “slave,” with a commanding tone.  We continued walking.  But it is amazing the power of a single word.  It resonated through my guts for a day and the next morning I was at her bedside asking if I could get her anything, make her a coffee.  And then I was serving her coffee in bed.

And I read the book.

To be honest, all the wait and anticipation, years of holding the book thinking I would get to it eventually, and well, no, the book was not to my liking.

The character, Siddhartha, comes across as arrogant.  And the writer’s voice does to.  This is not something that sits well with me.  And the idea that someone who is arrogant, and stays arrogant throughout the book, even as he comes closer and closer to an enlightened state, is faintly absurd.

Siddhartha even meets Gautama, the Buddha, founder of Buddhism, has conversation with him, and is superior, supercilious, in his false humility.  It is the author’s voice.

Some books do not stand the test of time, and this would be one of them.  The book was written in 1922.  Herman Hesse wrote many books, a collective oeuvre which earned him a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946.  He was born in 1877 in Germany and died at the age of 85, in 1962.

He will have lived through very tempestuous times.  It was also a period of German arrogance towards the world, which might have affected him.  He left Germany in 1911 and moved to Switzerland.  He worked for the Red Cross.  He was known for his compassion.

But there are passages in the book which ring problematic in today’s world.  The story recounts Siddhartha’s journey.  Here is an excerpt from the publisher.

“Siddhartha, a handsome Brahmin’s son, is clover and well-loved, yet increasingly dissatisfied wit the life that is expected of him.  Setting out on a spiritual journey to discover a higher state of being, his quest leads him through the temptations of luxury and wealth, the pleasures of sensual love, and the sinister threat of death-dealing snakes, until, eventually, he comes to a river.  There a ferryman guides him to his destiny, and to the ultimate meaning of his existence.  Inspired by Herman Hesse’s profound regard for Indian transcendental philosophy and written in porse of graceful simplicity, Siddhartha is one of the most influential spiritual works of the twentieth century.”

Penguin fiction

Sounds promising.  And for the story of someone who is on a journey of self-discovery, towards greater and greater simplicity, presence, and ego death, his approach seems off.  And this reflects the author’s own bias.  Everything that Siddhartha does he ends up doing so much better than everyone else that he tires of it.  The book is one giant lament of how great he is and that this produces a kind of ennui that forces him to go and seek the next thing.

The passages where he meets a courtesan, a beautiful woman, and gives up his loin cloth and raggedy aspect to become her lover, is absurd and pathetic.  Written with a man’s sense of sexual inferiority, of course Siddhartha becomes the greatest lover that this courtesan has ever encountered, and in his arms she could not but help fall in love with him.

It is pathetic, patriarchal claptrap.  Indeed, the entire book smacks of cultural imperialism, with Hesse writing about Buddhism in a very Western-centric way.

The introduction to the current edition was written by no less an author than Paolo Coelho.  Coelho found the book to be life-changing, giving voice to a generation’s rebellion and struggle.  I couldn’t get past the misogyny and superior world view.

Understandably, Star Child and I discussed this once I had finished.  I shared with her my thoughts.

“Yeah,” she said with a wry smile, “I don’t like that book anymore either.”  As she walked ahead of me, I couldn’t help but notice the lace turn-downs on her white socks.