Review of Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

This book was pretty mediocre. It was very repetitive: it simply seemed like Siddhartha "learned" something, then realized it was bad, then "learned" more stuff constantly. Admittedly, this parallels most plots, but in this book it felt particularly pronounced in that Siddhartha's speech repeats itself a lot after each "enlightenment", an especially obvious one is the spamming of asyndetons (i.e. excluding the last and in a list). I think the best way to describe it was that it did too much telling, and not enough showing, but what it told was the same every time. The lack of showing is painful in the Siddhartha-Govinda relationship. It is supposed to be an extremely deep, lifelong friendship but is described as extremely asymmetric, with Govinda just following Siddhartha and is also just underdeveloped.

Obviously there were some interesting ideas though (this is a classic after all). This book takes a more Westernized view of Asian culture: Siddhartha rejects authority many, many times in order to find his own individual enlightenment. This conflicts with the traditional Asian culture of listening to your elders (filial piety), the less influential authoritarianism of legalism, and the strict caste hierarchy of India. I also was hit in the feels when they reminded us of Siddhartha's family near the end, whom he hasn't seen ever since he forced them to accept that he was leaving them. The first "enlightenment" was also intriguing in how he describes it—it was very existential in how he started to look at reality without the cultural norms, without meaning and just began to appreciate it. It was also surprising in that he knows, nay he feels it in his very being, that Gotama is the enlightened one, the Buddha. Yet he boldly separates from his lifelong friend to pursue his own individual path.

Siddhartha also encounters the idea of determinism in the river: he sees the river as time, connecting past, present, and future as a river flows from mountain to plain to ocean, yet we still can see it as one thing, the river. He also gets the idea of Aristotle's arête—the idea that perfection is a balance between two extremes—in the two extremes of asceticism and materialism. Even ideas of fatherhood are present: Siddhartha ends up having a son, but he realizes that he must eventually let his son go and exercise their freedom as his dad did with him. Interestingly, the book ends up advocating in many ways for conservatism: suffering, pleasure, rebirth, all of it are just experiences that someday may be merged into perfection, suggesting a futility of striving for real change and progress. The book seems to be much more of a chronicle of Siddhartha becoming wise, a very conservative value. I suppose here we see the traditional Asian values return.