‘A writer of genius’
–The Times
Hermann Hesse’s novels – spiritual, profound, influenced by Eastern philosophy and Jungian psychology – have been totems and guides for seekers all over the world since he began writing at the turn of the 20th century.
Hesse himself was a troubled, questioning child, straining against the repressive atmosphere of his pious home. He travelled to Sri Lanka and Indonesia in 1911, married multiple times, earned criticism for calling for peace during the First World War, and helped Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht to leave Nazi Germany. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. The New Yorker called him ‘a passport to the counterculture’, The Times crowned him ‘a writer of genius’; his graceful simplicity of style, combined with the depth of his insight, are as fresh today as they were a hundred years ago.
The Journey to the East
A dreamlike tale of a band of spiritual seekers united by a vow of silence – and of the kaleidoscopic fracturing of memory and identity that a writer undergoes when he attempts to describe their quest.
Translated by Hilda Rosner
Demian
Initially published under the pseudonym Emil Sinclair – its protagonist’s name – this coming-of-age novel tells the story of a troubled young student liberated from convention by his transformative friendship with the bold, unconventional Max Demian.
Translated by W.J. Strachan
Siddhartha
Hesse’s most famous work, Siddhartha tells the story of a privileged young Brahmin who abandons his life and family to embark on a quest for spiritual truth. Modelled on the life of the Buddha, this short, radiant novel is a timeless work of literature and an inexhaustible source of wisdom.
Translated by Hilda Rosner
If you loved Hesse, try these Classics…
Deep River by Shusaku Endo
Another novelist known for his deep engagement with spiritual themes and his limpid style, here Endo writes against the backdrop of India – the source of so many transformative ideas for Hesse. It’s the 1980s, and a group of Japanese tourists has travelled to the shores of the Ganges, each bringing their own doubts and difficulties with them. Endo once again proves himself a profound chronicler of religious experience in this deceptively simple, deeply moving novel.
Translated by Van C. Gessel
The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna
If Hesse is the high priest of countercultural literature, Paasilinna is the court jester, full of laughter and absurdity. But he shared Hesse’s urge to break free of convention and find a truer, more joyful plane of life – which his hero Kaarlo Vatanen does here by jumping out of a car and following a hare into the Finnish forest. His wife and colleagues are determined to confine him in his narrow city existence again, but Vatanen has tasted adventure and he won’t give it up easily…
Translated by Herbert Lomas
Change Your Life: Essential Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke
Rilke and Hesse were born within a couple of years of each other, wrote many of their greatest works during the same decades at the beginning of the 20th century, and both lived in Switzerland – but what they shared above all was an intense focus on spiritual truth and integrity of being. Hesse might have taken as his motto Rilke’s words in the poem ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’ (trans. Martyn Crucefix): ‘there is no place/that does not see you. You must change your life.’
Translated by Martyn Crucifix